Slashdot Mirror

...in this Computerworld story.

It actually names MicroSoft as being negligent, or at least somewhat responsible. Maybe this one will open eyes despite the huge media machine?

---

Microsoft said in its legal brief that the Appeals Court should have disqualified Jackson at the first instance he began meeting privately with news organizations to discuss the case. The meetings occurred before Jackson issued his first part of the decision in the case, his findings of fact in November 1999.

Well if that's the case, Bill Gates should have been incarcerated at the first instance of perjuring himself during the antitrust trial!!!

"ComputerWorld" - Casinos Hit Jackpot With Customer Data. CRM leaders keep detailed dossiers on loyal gamblers

While the rest of corporate America is waking up to the value of truly detailed customer information, the neon-lit enclave of casino gambling is already taking it to unmatched levels.

Socioeconomic databases, loyalty cards, the cross-matching of credit card data with other files--they're all at work in the gambling business. These aren't things that supermarkets, banks or retailers don't do. But casinos have become masters of customer relationship management (CRM), having mined more complex customer data on a larger scale for a longer time than just about any other industry.

In its latest annual report, Harrah's Entertainment Inc. bragged, "We know what our customers like," then provided examples of the kind of detail the company tracks. "Tom likes NASCAR, Clint Holmes, thick steaks. Joyce and Ted like oceanfront views, barbershop quartets, Elvis slots. . . ."

Well the license was not redifined but "clarified" in it's meaning, the license never changed, there are no free versions.

So Darren has said recently. But, in all fairness, that just doesn't fit the evidence. See for instance this post from a year ago, where Darren refers to his work as "public domain." Contrast that with his more recent statement in computerworld that he has "never considered IPFilter to be open-source."

The license hasn't changed, no, but Darrens publically stated interpretation of the license sure as hell has.

Having followed this story closely, the best I can tell what happened is this. Darren initially intended his license to be BSD compatible, wrote it to be BSD compatible, and everyone using and contributing thought it was indeed BSD compatible. Darren didn't correct them because so far as he was concerned they were correct. Recently he got upset at the possibility or actuality (not sure which) of people distributing modified versions of his own betas, and added the "clarification" to a beta, intending only to prohibit modified versions of that particular version, not of regular releases. At this point Theo and others realised that the original license was indeed less than perfectly clear, and fearing that he would try to extend the prohibition further, and concerned that the license wasn't clear enough about modifications, they began to ask him to change the license. Apparently Theo managed to really rub him the wrong way in the process, and he got angry, and decided based on the vagueness in the licensing terms he could get away with closing it all retroactively, just to spite Theo. Begin the flamefests and the inevitable removal of ipfilter from OBSD.

The Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act (UCITA) is a draft law that seeks to bring consistent rules to software contracts and licensing agreements.

The salaries you quote for IT are way off.

The "typical" programmer, Unix admin, or network guy in the US makes $50,000, some more, some less. Contract workers are a completely different story, but they're the first to go when budgets get cut.

Just because the crowd you know, or the Slashdot crowd for that matter, makes a killing in IT doesn't mean that the majority do.

Try reading a salary survey from a weekly like Computerworld. Granted this one is from mid-year 1999, but things don't change much year-to-year in the "real world" of IT. Look at the figures: Average programmer = $45,000. Average network admin = $49,000.

These numbers are completely on-par with my knowledge of IT in media, manufacturing, retail, and even pharmaceutical companies. (having consulted in these less glamorous than .com industries) And from what I've experienced, they're about right for the value most IT people provide to their employers.

Try here.

Not according to the article in Computerworld. I don't use Amazon so I do not have any firsthand experience. Do you have a link that shows it was 50/50?

The whole point was to directly measure the demand curve by testing two prices simultaneously, and that requires that the experiment and control groups be as demographically identical as possible.

Even if they did it by assigning prices to customers on a random basis, it still left a bad taste in the consumer's mouth since it was easily verified that different customers got different prices. When stores try these experiments in the brick and mortar world, they usually do it by geographic locations. Customer's are accustomed to the fact that the same product will be priced differently in different parts of the country.

Basically what the manufacturer is working on (it's not available yet) is a motion sensor and alarm, tied in with some form of drive encryption. Move it far enough that it thinks it's being stolen (user-configurable parameters) and it bluescreens the system and won't restart without a 16-digit code; the drive contents are protected because they're encrypted using keys built into the motion sensor system.

This is far from optimal:

• it presumably requires some significant driver support and will probably be limited to Win2k initially;
• anyone serious enough about it may be able to extract encryption keys from the device itself;
• hm, 16-digit number.... Guess I'll have to go through the guy's garbage for his credit card numbers;
• it's not available (though apparently betas exist).

Still, at the moment there aren't a lot of other options out there either. I'd expect to see quite a few more products along similar lines cropping up in the next few years.

There are certainly more effective possibilities out there....

One possibility would be a combination of hardware-level drive encryption keys and this sort of motion-sensor setup to keep the system from being stolen while active. Keys would be read from a removable device (iButton- or USBKey-like) as part of the power-up process and would be kept in RAM. Removing the key device would trigger a hardware-level system lock (many notebooks have these already, completely independent of the OS) but the system could keep running. Because the system stays on, it remains easy to step away from it while leaving it well protected - requiring the key to be present for drive access would be much more troublesome, because it would mean either shutting down or hibernating the system or having the OS aware of the protection so disk activity could be prevented without the key. This could be done almost entirely independent of the OS, with a fairly simple interface to make configuration changes.

-- fencepost

Check out this article in ComputerWorld.

Typical speeds for 3G devices will be more like one-third of this advertised maximum or less.

Most users will experience something like 600Kpbs (because the spectrum is shared among many users).

Not that 600Kbps wouldn't be an improvement, but 2.4Mpbs it isn't.

So maybe this would be a good reason to get M$ back in court

It seems that Bill or his lawyers read history. If time were in a position to honour anything, we would be considering a time-honoured practice here.

The exact same method was used to acquire enormous power by the Medievel Church. They worked very hard to become confessors to important people, then used or sold the information confessed for even further political entrenchment. Of course, if someone became too much of an obstacle, they could always be bumped off their perch.

So... Microsoft are taken to court, and then one day a judge finds an email in his inbox with copies of emails to and from his son's Hotmail account - concerning specific indiscretions - attached; or copies of an email conversation between him and a particular woman; or whatever. I'm sure you get the idea.

Suddenly, having Microsoft lose a case seems an exceptionally bad idea to the judge. Meanwhile, the other judges are seeing rising pressure from friends and relatives (many of whom, it seems, also have Hotmail/Passport accounts), which combined with another astroturf movement might be enough to throw the case.

Ok. My numbers are thus: Computerworld reference to the Jupiter/MM study. According to this, MSN and Yahoo! were each trailing behinf AIM by approximately 8 million users (of 18 million on AIM). And that was as of November 2000. I seriously doubt either has fully surpassed that gap since, but I admit it may be closing.

-Andrew

2) Cardslot is SD (secure digital) and a bunch o' companies (Panasonic for one) use it. It can also read MMC (multimedia card), which you see around quite a bit too. The advantage over CompactFlash is that it draws less juice. Which is a good thing. Also they have a whole bunch of people who will probably quickly make their own versions of it. It shouldn't be too hard for Handspring Springboard vendors to rejigger their devices to work on the Palm hardware. Bigger install base. Unlike Sony, which has almost no developers of Memory STick add-ons, this might work. Sony is overpriced and hasn't sold well.

What I don't like about this is price ($450 for the color, only $50 than the new monochrome, like anyone wouldn't pay the difference) point .... I bought a IIIxe b/c it was 8mb (which the new ones continue to be) and $200.

I'd rather pay $200 every year than $400 every two. You get the good stuff quicker. Here's an article too.

What's interesting is how Handspring will respond -- new read/write Springboards? And soon supposedly Sony has a 320x320 Palm OS color Clie coming out.

There's another raskin interview here at Computerworld from last week. Briefly, Raskin gives an overview of what's wrong with current GUIs -- Linux, Mac, Windows -- and how zooming interfaces will just bring the components of what's needed to the fore. If you think about it, 20 years is a long time to have had only small improvements in the GUI ...

It is best to isolate various tasks, so failures at one level don't propagate through everything. One example of a failure is a network administrator deleting PC files, server files, and the backups are missing (verdict later set aside).

Look at accounting procedures: the amount on checks compared to amount on deposit slip, compared to totals from clerks opening bill-paying envelopes, compared to amounts credited to people's accounts for payments, compared to number of envelopes given to the clerks who open the envelopes, compared to the total number of envelopes from the bill-payment P.O. box. Confirmations of confirmations.

It is best to isolate various tasks, so failures at one level don't propagate through everything. One example of a failure is a network administrator deleting PC files, server files, and the backups are missing (verdict later set aside).

Look at accounting procedures: the amount on checks compared to amount on deposit slip, compared to totals from clerks opening bill-paying envelopes, compared to amounts credited to people's accounts for payments, compared to number of envelopes given to the clerks who open the envelopes, compared to the total number of envelopes from the bill-payment P.O. box. Confirmations of confirmations.

"The Sandia labs and Celera Genomics Group in Rockville, Md., plan to work together on the project under a joint research and development agreement, with Houston-based Compaq as their technology provider. The planned system will be built around future versions of Compaq's AlphaServer SC supercomputer line and is being designed for use in complex applications in the fields of computational biology and life sciences...."

"The prototype supercomputer will likely use 10,000 to 20,000 of Compaq's Alpha processors and is being budgeted at $150 million in current costs, according to Blake. He added that the first system could eventually lead to the development of a so-called "petacruncher" -- a machine capable of 1,000 teraflops -- by the end of the decade."

there's also interesting stuff at http://www.cio.com/

rr

Well, since the Xeon processors don't suffer from the cache problems that the Sun processors do, I would imagine that the uptime is pretty good.

How's the scalability on the E450 past 4 processors? Non-existent you say? You mean I'd have to spend $223,000.00 on a Sun to even begin to think about something beyond quad-processors? I could spend a 1/5 of that for an 8-processor Compaq/Dell/HP and get better tpc-c performance than the E4500.

The million dollar bet was bullshit and anybody with some sense knew it. Sun's best posted tpc-c score for a non-clustered server is ~150,000 for a 64-way E10k running Sybase for a cost of about $7,000,000. Compaq's best submitted performance for a 4-way server is ~35,000 with Win2k and SQL2k for around $500,000. So basically I get 1/4 the performance for 1/14 the price. Suns cluster really well, you say? The tpc-c number one position right now belongs to a clustered Compaq running Win2k and SQL2k.

Despite these numbers, I agree with you, but not on the basis of performance. When I let my own personal preferences and emotions come into play I like unix a whole lot better than I like Windows anything. As a matter of fact I despise Microsoft Server products, but that doesn't mean that they aren't faster and that they don't get good uptime. Most people's concepts of uptime are based on client systems and sub-optimal configurations that tend to go down. Microsoft server products can be optimized to be stable.

The fact remains that Sun is dropping the ball. Their most impressive hardware just isn't that impressive anymore. The USIII is way way late and not really very impressive. It is an incremental improvement over the USII. Fortunately, it does actually get more done per clock cycle than an Intel P3, but only slightly more. Hopefully they can get the clock speed up.

In the end, if I cared about cost, performance, and reliability I'd be more apt to run FreeBSD. If I were forced to run Oracle, I'd definitely consider Linux on Intel. If I needed to scale really well I'd probably use an HP9000 or an RS6000.

I still haven't seen anybody support an argument for why one would use a Sun Box for a particular application over Win2k on Intel. I can certainly think of a few, but that's me.

Here/a& gt; is an interesting little article about the top 10 IT disasters. I don't know if each would be considered a Deathmarch, but if not they're sure close. The craziest thing is how much money each of these projects burned up without being able to accomplish anything close to the goal.

. .

It's short, but here's a review of Star Office 5.2 on Computerworld

Now I'm not knocking anything here, because I use Star Office 5.2 myself and got our office switched to it, but will the current efforts translate into e.g. a review in Business Week print edition (like MacOs-X got one time ages ago) and the kind of coverage which actually pursuades executives without recourse to code analysis or monopolies debates?

Surely given the adspend Sun places these days, a few more mainstream reviewers could be perusuaded / invited to load a copy and write it up?

Anyone seen a good print or online review out there in the mainstream business press?

== Idle Random Thoughts. Usual Disclaimers Apply ==

Let's hope Sun has fixed the recent memory cache (or should I say crash) probl ems affecting their recent Ultrasparc-II processors in this new generation. Thankfully they replaced the faulty CPU modules if confronted with it.

Now I don't even have to leave Amazon to do my price comparison
shopping! Just view the site with different browsers and cookies,
and see what kind of deals you can get!

Does this mean we can figure out Amazon's 'pricing scheme' to rip them off?

Compu terWorld also covered this story, with a little different slant than Excite's coverage.

Here I have a whole bunch of links to further information about wearable computers and "enhanced reality" for anyone interested:

• A Brief History Of Wearable Computing
• Affective Computing
• BBC News: Japan Eyes Wearable PC
• Charmed Technology
• CNET.com: 10 Technologies That Will Take Over - #8
• CNN: Excuse Me, Is That A Monitor On Your Head?
• CNN: MIT 'Cyborgs' Bridge Gap Between Man And Machine
• CNN: Turn On, Jack In, And Geek Out With Wearable PC
• CNN: Wearable Systems May Cut Labor, Save Time
• CNN: Xybernaut Now Has Linux For Wearable PCs
• CNN Poll: Do You Want A Wearable Computer?
• Computer For The 21st Century, The
• ComputerWorld: Wearable Computers - Digitally Attired
• Context-Aware Computing
• CTHEORY: Body Delirium
• DisplayWear Incorporated
• Extreme Computing
• Handykey, Inc. Wearable Computing Page
• Houston Chronicle: Future Phones Home, The
• ICBorg
• Intelligent Information Filters And Enhanced Reality, by Alexander Chislenko
• ISWC- International Symposium on Wearable Computers
• Marvin Elizondo's Wearable Computing Page
• MicroOptical
• MIT-IDEO Wearables Intro
• NetWork Fusion: Armani, Karan, Xybernaut? 02/01/999
• PBS: Scientific American Frontiers Transcripts - Inventing The Future (Aired Fall 1996)
• PC World News: Wearable PC To Debut At Comdex
• PopSci.com Headlines: CyberFashions
• Slashdot Articles: Wearable PCs Under Linux
• Smart Rooms
• TechWearable
• TekGear
• Wearable Computer
• Wearable Computing Intro Page
• Wearable Computing Portal
• Wearable Computing Resource Page
• WearableGear.com
• Wearables Central
• Wearables WebCrawler Search Engine
• Wearables Webring
• WearableTech Corp.
• Wired News: Annotated Reality
• Wired News: Intel Chips In On Future Devices
• Wired News: Waiting For Wearable Wearables
• Wraith Projects
• Xybernaut

Impossible means no one's done it yet.

ComputerWorld has a story about how some fixed wireless companies are saying that various at-sea internet connections are threats to public safety and should be outlawed. Might be On Topic for your question.

The flaw was discovered in the PGP 5.0 code base
and is specific to Linux and OpenBSD command-line
versions ... Versions 2.x and 6.5 of PGP aren't
affected and nor are PGP versions ported to other
platforms.

The original article is here.

The original article is here.

Last September, /. featured an article about SCO and their view on Linux. The opinions they had about Linux were less than flattering to say the least. I have been thinking about SCO's possible motivations for this recent "change of heart", but I can only conclude that it is from a rapidly decreasing market share. Is it possible that SCO finally realized that Linux isn't for "some punk young kids" as mentioned in this article? I am skeptical of this... I'm not anti-SCO, but I was somewhat disheartened to read anyone putting Linux down in such a way. Could someone from SCO fill me in on why you've suddenly made Linux your best friend?

Wasn't the CEO of SCO one of thoese bozo's who was blasting Linux about a year ago...hmmmm lets go here for a quick read ... then hop over here for more.

Here's my favorite quote from the brilliant SCO CEO:

Q: Do you consider Linux friend or foe?

A: Linux is a religion. It's like considering the Catholic Church a competitor. I'm not a religion; I'm a commercial operating system.


Hmmmm... so now they are tanking in a major way and singing a different tune. Well, I guess maybe they should have been a little more forward thnking about a year ago. I say screw em, if you refuse to change with the times you will get left behind. I would think that a "smart" CEO would try to capaitalize on the popularity of Linux ( like IBM did.. ) instead of burying you head in the sand and acting like you are the shit. So now they are going to reorganize... hhmpf.

The most serious problem, however, is that politicians and policymakers here in Washington do not grasp even the most basic technical ideas propelling the information revolution.

In other words, the conspiracy theorists who long believed that the government would use Y2K (and the Y2K "bunker") as an excuse to dismantle American institutions had it backwards: we are not in danger of elite or intelligence government agents making decisions, we are in danger because the government is financially and technologically muscular, but philosophically and intellectually malnourished.

A. Keiper
The Center for the Study of Technology and Society

Barnes and Noble would have patented it and may have been much worse than Amazon. After all Barnes and Noble sued Amazon the day after barnesandnoble.com went online because it claimed Amazon was not "Earth's biggest bookstore" as the Amazon slogan said.

Barnes and Noble has been out to crush Amazon the same way it bullied and crushed independent booksellers for at least the past two years. After all B&N was trying to become a true monopolist by buying up book publishers then using that against their competitors. IMHO opinion Amazon got this patent just to protect them against B&N which has showed itself to be a completely ruthless and unscrupulous competitor.

God only knows how much worse things would have been if Barnes and Noble had gotten the patent. That said the patent is still wrong but if the USPTO is going to be stupid enough to grant those patents then Amazon has a right to grab as many as possible to protect themselves from Barnes & Noble.

• Amazon.co m, Barnes & Noble settle lawsuit
• Barnes & Noble Fights for Best-Seller' List
• Advertising Battle Of The On-line Bookstores (Adlaw)
• Tons of related links on C|Net

Another thing that struck me while thinking about this whole thing. Remember what Ford did? He patented ideas so that others couldn't patent them and abuse the patents. He then allowed everyone to use his ideas for free. Perhaps that's what Jeff is doing here. I have no proof, but I'm hoping it's that way.

--

It has been several hours and no word on this case except for a ComputerWorld article that just says the case happened no info on the outcome. Read it here. .
Anyway has anyone heard anything on the results of this or the case in San Jose (still waiting for the judge)? Well maybe no news is good news. If the MPAA was successful 2600 would be gone by now, which it is not.

This article is paying lip-service to the community. Given ZD Net's track record I wouldn't be suprised if it was written specifically to get posted to slashdot (like many other articles like
this which seem to make it to the front page). Don't buy it.

Not sure what you're getting at here. If you mean that the article was on ZDNet, it wasn't - it's on InfoWorld which is an IDG publication (and a bitter rival of all things ZD). If you mean that InfoWorld is just imitating ZDNet by posting a pro-Linux column, then I have a rebuttal or two. Apart from the boneheaded Bob Metcalfe column of last year, InfoWorld and IDG have a very good track record on Linux support. Nick Petreley writes the back page column in InfoWorld "Down To The Wire". It's the most consistently pro-Linux column I know, except for perhaps his editorials in LinuxWorld, another IDG publication, of which he is the editor. InfoWorld gave Redhat "Best Supported Product of 1998 Award", something which raised serious eyebrows when it was given.
ComputerWorld has also had some excellent reviews of various distros and applications like StarOffice.
About the only bump in the road from the average /.er's point of view has been the idiotic column by Metcalfe. But that's not too much out of the ordinary - columnists are expected to be opinionated and stirring is part of their job.
The bottom line: IDG has supported Linux since long before it was fashionable to do so, and they've put their money where their mouths are.

Although his candidacy has not been officially announced as far as I know, I plan on voting for Ralph Nader of the Green Party. He has written a number of anti-M$ pieces, including this one, co-authored with a known Linux advocate.

Most important to my decision is the knowledge that his stand on these issues isn't manufactured just for the sake of a campaign, but rooted in personal convictions.

I just hope they've learned something here...

Well, I disagree with you. I know a lot about the problem. But I think there is a high probability of significant problems that will affect many people. I am not frightened - I am prepared.

Some facts to keep in mind:

44% of MAJOR corporations will NOT have their mission critical systems fixed by January. (Source: Cap Gemini, see this ComputerWorld article). And over half a million small companies are fixing nothing in advance, instead hoping to fix on failure.

Only 13% of small and midsize chemical and petroleum firms in the United States have completed preparations. Many of these are close to residential areas, and an accident could be a significant health risk.

The US FDA says 4053 high-risk biomedical devices remain noncompliant, and more than half of health-care providers will not be ready.

The IRS (yes the IRS!) is still doing INVENTORY of the computers in their field offices, and will almost certainly not be completely ready in time.

The US State Dept: "80 countries are at moderate to high risk, and there will be failures at every economic level in every region of the world."

Economic disruption is inevitable. It is impossible to predict how bad it will be, as that will depend on what systems fail and how long it will take to repair them. Even if every computer system in North America was completely fixed, we are dependent on trade with many countries who are far, far behind. Like Japan and Germany.

I am no doomsayer - I think North American banks and stock markets are probably OK, and the electrical grid is probably mostly fixed and will work. So civilization will not come to an end.

Don't panic. But don't believe that just because people are working on it, that it will be done in time. That is apparently your opinion - maybe you can explain why nearly all software projects are late, buggy, and over budget? Do you think that Y2K repairs will somehow be immune to these inevitable problems?

You blame the media for being uninformed. I agree - but I think they are far to likely to swallow the happy-happy joy-joy stories of official spokespeople and ignore the very real problems that are out there.

Not everything will be fixed. Your life may be affected, hopefully only in small ways. Deal.

Torrey (Azog) Hoffman

But those are all technology companies, and there are many programming jobs that aren't in technology companies. Almost every medium-to-large company has an IS department that has real technology problems to solve every day, and it's in this kind of results-centirc environment that Linux and its kin have flourished in the past, and they still do today.

One shining example of this is Burlington Coat Factory. They have been using Unix for about as long as there has been Unix to use. They have an IS department that is constantly creating and improving the software that they need to use every day to sell coats. They have long realized that opening the source code for many of their tools can only help them, and that by using Open Source tools that already exist, they can leverage good stable code as a basis for their own future improvements. People in thier IS department have been contributing to projects like lprng , and the Red Hat distribution. It is in no small part due to their positive experiences with these projects that they felt comfortable embracing Linux.

There have got to be plenty of jobs doing real programming work for non-technology companies where Open Source is so natural a solution that it's hardly worth mentioning, and thus rarely gets news coverage.

I do not work for Burlington Coat Factory, although I have friends that do. I do not speak for BCF.

--Chouser

Open Source aside, there are a few other free Desktops on the web, with varying degrees of functionality.

There was an article in Computer World about them.

I used two of them, Netscape Netcenter, and Visto's Briefcase. Each has its strong points, but neither is perfect (Visto fails to sync the Pilot flawlessly, and NetCenter doesn't upload all bookmarks and Address books).

The idea of syncing my Pilot to the web, having all the web bookmarks, E-Mail anywhere in the world when I travel, at home, at client sites, or at the office is very appealing.

--

Perhaps Alan was thinking of Amerada Hess although the IBM machine replaced is described as a supercomputer.

At the moment, there are few cases of established companies that have been seriously hurt by open source (SCO?), but the signs on the ground are there that it's going to start happening more and more, specifically in connection with Microsoft.

As one small example, I've talked to IT managers at smallish companies (50-200 employees) that have been through the cycle of migrating from file servers running Novell to file servers running NT. Some of them are now wondering if they should migrate again, to Linux servers (with their existing Windows workstations.)

Why would they do this? Obviously cost is an issue: why pay expensive MS per-user or per-server license fees for something as basic as file services, which can now be had from any of a number of reliable, free operating systems? Also, customers don't like Microsoft's upgrade-pushing style: one company I know recently was told by MS support to install IE5 on their main file server, in order to fix a problem they were having. This raised some eyebrows, and reminded the customer that with MS, they don't necessarily get to control what software they install on their own boxes. Besides, this says one of two things about Microsoft: either they're deliberately forcing customers to upgrade to newer versions, even of software the customer shouldn't need; or they're not sufficiently competent, either at the support or development level, to maintain separation between their products. Either way, the customer isn't in control, and these are good reasons for customers to consider alternatives.

The same goes for web & proxy servers, etc. - I'm seeing Microsoft shops starting to experiment with these kinds of services running on Linux.

The Linux enterprise server and/or workstation revolution may still be some ways away, but Microsoft is going to start feeling price pressure from Linux on its server licensing policy sometime soon, if it hasn't already.

Articles like this one about General Motors considering Linux for 7,500 dealerships are, at the very least, forcing Microsoft to cut deals with particular customers, or lose business.

The Linux FUD page which Microsoft recently posted on its web site is proof of its concern.

In fact, Linux and open source are particularly interesting disruptive technologies, because they aren't controlled by for-profit companies acting in their own interests, as previous disruptive technologies have been. There really does seem to be the potential here for a fundamental shift in the economics of intellectual property, that may eventually extend beyond the software world (into media, for example). That's not to say that proprietary software will necessarily die, just that it will have to change in some difficult-to-foresee ways, to make room for an unusual competitor.

In many ways, it isn't so hard to understand: companies and individuals are learning the value of sharing on a global scale.

To be perfectly blunt, to implement Exchange like that would be *INSANE*.

First of all, suggesting to implement an NT solution for an organization of that size is already tempting your job security, but to actually do it?

Assuming standard users and needs for this system, I can only recommend using a Lotus Notes/Domino system. If you've got the cash, there is simply no better solution out there, or even close.

Run Domino (the server end of Notes) on several UNIX servers. Solaris (SPARC and x86), AIX, and HP/UX are all supported, with a Linux port (Caldera 2.3 (currently in beta) and Red Hat 6.0 will be supported, as well as SuSE 6.1 and Pacific HiTech) on it's way Q4 99 per DevCon.

Notes has got all you'll ever need, and R5 simply blows away anything M$ has out there. You've got to pay for seats with Notes, but to tell you the truth, Exchange is free, and you get less than you pay for.

Plus, your users can run the Notes client on any Win32 they think is prettiest (please tell me you'll use NT and not 9x on the client end).

Look at this for a guy in your situation who had to deal with Exchange.

Some other really good links are here, here, and here:

http://www.notes.net/50beta.nsf/7d6a87824e2f0976 8525655b0050f2f2/35BEC3BF6D717A3F852567120 07A435A?OpenDocument
(problem with the last one, copy it and cut out the space that is stuck between the zero's, the href tag keeps putting it in! It is a great article though : )

(TIP: Show the guys with the money those links so they know why you should use a Domino/Notes solution.)

Most likely because Beowulf-style clustering is useless, whereas failover-style clustering is not.
Unless, of course, there are many companies in the business of easily-parallelised calculations.

This link mentions one of these "companies in the business of easily parallelised calculations." So is every other company in this industry, So are the Stock market clearinghouses. Not to mention NASA, where Beowulf was created. Oh, and let's not forget anywhere a Cray, a Pacific Blue, a NEC Mainframe or a connection machine is in use.

While not common everyday business use, the beowulf cluster is very important in the scientific industries.

And squid or ganged/switched apache can do the job the same way in more reliable HARDWARE.

>So Lotus has finally decided to "jump on the Linux bandwagon" has it?

For the last time! This is OLD news. Here is the JANUARY Computerworld snippet that says they would be developing the 5.0 server for linux.
Linus Redux

>Lotus strikes me as a company very fond of heading in whatever direction the latest band-wagon might happen to be headed.

Read above statement. They were talking about it when everyone else did. Does this change your opinion?

>Recently, they dropped Unix support for all but the Domino server.

That would be because they are going to browser access. Only a couple of clients are being developed for DB Application Design!!! Seems to me that Lotus *IS* the forward thinking company that you say they are not.

>you can not win the game by allowing Microsoft to set the rules!

MS has never set the rules in this area. They have never gained ground on the installed base of notes. MS for once is clawing and scratching and still losing.

In fact, this information about a linux port was ON /. It is truely sad how easilly this community has taken misinformation and twisted it around against LN/D. I wouldnt blame them if they didn't release it after all.

You're little linux bandwagon is just a little chevette in an SUV world. Stop compaining.

From what I can gather, Burlington Coat Factory is retaining its DOS POS application. Jay Jacobs, on the other hand, is going Linux at POS.


This is especially interesting for me, as we are designing a new POS system at my employer right now, and the OSes being considered are NT Embedded and CE 3.0. All because our Pentium-equivalent, 48Mb RAM registers won't handle NT5.0! At least Linux exists!


I'll keep fighting. I had a great opportunity this morning when someone was warning of the dangers of M$ switching tracks on us and leaving us with unsupported technology. I pointed out that if we had the source code to the OS that that couldn't happen. Linux again? they groaned. Oh well, at least they know what I'm talking about, even if they don't agree.

In his writeup in Risks 20.36 Richard Smith (one of the folks that reported the tracking policy) points out that keeping too much information poses a risk to the Website or ISP collecting the information as well as to the users who are being monitored. To summarize his argument, the more information these sites collect, the more likely they are to get dragged into a legal dispute that doesn't really involve them directly. So, an argument can be made that respecting users' privacy is beneficial for users and ISPs alike.

-r

How many customers will spend how long waiting for vendors to port stuff to Windows 2000 now...