Domain: nwfusion.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to nwfusion.com.
Comments · 281
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Re:wrong
No, they're not about tariffs. They're about maintaining a historical privacy culture that someone like you would never be able to understand.
It's funny that EU citizens believe they have "privacy" culture and then gladly fill out government income tax and census forms that provide every detail about their religion, charitable affiliations, income, address, occupation, and number of children. Why are governments considered "safe havens" for data? It was governmental census data that was used to identify ethnic and religious targets of the Holocaust.
Why are EU citizens so proud of new privacy laws give government's more access to their personal data then they had before? Flying the banner of privacy "enforcement", governments can now "spot check" any database or data flow without showing warrant or cause.
Isn't it interesting that one of the first enforcements of EU privacy directives wasn't to protect citizens data but to slap Microsoft with thousands of dollars of fines over a disagreement about font types and sizes in Windows 98?
Hmmmm, doesn't impact privacy but it does impact trade. -
You can get fiber in Keller Texas already."Verizon has begun an ambitious rollout of fiber optics to businesses and residences with the deployment of 440,000 feet of cabling in suburban Dallas. The carrier this week announced that it is about halfway through the build-out of a fiber-to-the-premises (FTTP) network to every home and business in Keller, Texas, a city of 25,000. When completed, Verizon will string 1.2 million feet of fiber through Keller." "Verizon reiterated plans to pass about 1 million homes in nine states with FTTP by the end of the year. Earlier this year, analysts stated expectations that Verizon would fall short of that goal by about 200,000 to 300,000 homes, reportedly due to problems with initial equipment shipments from vendor AFC." http://www.nwfusion.com/edge/news/2004/0519foa.ht
m l -
water conservation by any other name
Mark Gibbs at Network World ran a http://www.nwfusion.com/columnists/2004/071904gea
r head.html/couple of articles about networking the garden. X-10 came up, as well as some other interesting technical problems. He points to a couple of sources for software, mostly closed source. And xeriscaping http://www.google.com/search?&q=%22xeriscape%2 2/ may give you a few ideas about designing for a water-restricted future. -
Re:logical next step after acquisition of SuSE
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Where's the article/newsletter?
Maybe it's just me, but I don't see mention of this anywhere in the most recent "Wireless Computing Devices" newsletter posted on THE NWFusion website...
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Where this is happening...
Ok, I'll admit up front I didn't read the article. I did, however, do a quick google search and found that the Keith Shaw listed on this page: http://www.nwfusion.com/events/wlan/index.html is a journalist who has WiFi knowledge. If you do a reverse lookup on the contact number for the organizers at the bottom of the page it turns our that he's probably in MARLBORO, Massachusetts.
Anybody feel like calling the cops there to find out if this is the case and what their side of the story is? -
Re:MIT/Symbolics "Space Cadet" keyboardStallman, from an interview:
- Q. Do you have carpal tunnel syndrome?
A. I never had carpal tunnel syndrome. I had hand problems.
Q. Are you able to code now?
A. Yes. Because it turns out my problem is not carpal tunnel syndrome, and the things that help it are not things that help carpal tunnel syndrome. It turns out for me a keyboard with a light touch is what I need, and I have keyboards with a light touch so I can now do my own typing. But I couldn't for a number of years. When I found suitable keyboards, and they're not funny shaped keyboards or anything, they're ordinary shaped keyboards, they just have keys you don't have to push very hard.
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Re:Spam firewall? I want a hard drive firewall
Wasn't making a great revelation that many of such things do exist (sorry if the wording sounded aggressive - I was annoyed by the article, not your suggestion), nor that they're configured in the way you suggest (which I think is spot on).
Using the term I suggest at least finds some discussion of this idea, like the following article:
http://www.nwfusion.com/newsletters/sec/0913sec2.h tml -
Re:But....
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Re:You paid for that spam -- enjoy it.
Over the years I have received more and more spam, and yet paid less and less for my internet connection (adjusted - barely!- for bandwidth).
Over the years, how much have computer costs, adjusted for performance and storage, dropped? The question isn't whether your absolute costs have dropped, it's how much they could have dropped were it not for spam.
Absolutely: spam costs ISPs big bucks. Absolutely: ISPs pass on these costs to their customers. But we're probably talking about cents per month per customer.
According to ISPs, the average cost, per month per customer, is between $2 and $3. That's $24 to $36/year, a significant sum. Businesses spend huge amount dealing with the spam problem. Take a look at NetworkFusionWorld's Spam Calculator" to see just how expensive spam is to businesses.
When you go to Best Buy, a percentage of what you pay for your purchase is to offset the cost of dealing with spam in the corporate offices. When you pay your taxes, a significant sum is paying government workers to deal with spam. When you order from Amazon.com, some of the money you spend there is to cover their costs for spam. I would not be at all surprised to see the total cost of spam per person averaging over $100/year.
BTW: bandwidth, servers, disks - none of these actually cost much money. The extra sysadmin or two to manage all of that... that's what costs money.
In general, I agree with that, but enterprise-class machines with RAID, tape backup, etc. is not the same as home PCs. The cost may be outweighed by the cost of system administrators, but it's still significant -- especially if it means that your connection is slower because their capital equipment budget on another mail server instead of additional broadband routers.
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don't bet on it...Probably just more of this:
Williams picks IBM for business transformation
The cost savings are expected to come from the transfer of about 460 employees to IBM, from streamlined work processes and from the use of more advanced IT systems
It's called outsourcing, that's how it works. -
Re:Multiple signals?
http://www.nwfusion.com/news/tech/2004/072604tech
u pdate.html
I think this may answer, not only your question, but a lot of others here on MIMO...seems to be pretty cool technology. More antennas, though, generally mean more power consumption... -
Re:-5 Silly
IE also has latent flaws that, once exploited, lead to hastily-deployed patches.
I don't know what dream world you're living in, but IE has had a number of security holes that MS considered to be "low-priority" and left unpatched for months It wasn't until Liu Die Yu and others figured out how to chain these holes together for one big spyware vector that MS started taking them seriously.- http://die.leox.com/ie_unpatched/
- http://www.nwfusion.com/news/2003/0929unpatieho.h
t ml - http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/06/10/ms_inpatc
h ed_ie_flaw/ - http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/2/11/54950/704
6
I'm not excusing the Mozilla team for leaving a couple vulnerabilities open for way too long, but they aren't nearly as numerous nor dangerous as some of the long-living (and gaping!) holes in IE. Saying "firefox is no better" is wrong, wrong, fucking wrong.
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Re:Imagine that.
I don't think security is the only concern, but reliability as well. A few more examples like this, and the at-large public will become more skeptical...
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RSS scalability
There's a variety of ways to deal with this issue. The solution many seem to be suggesting is to randomize request times so that there aren't big spikes in traffic every hour at the hour. That's certainly a good idea. Clients should also respect the ttl (polling at the interval that is listed in the feed), support conditional GET, and handle 304 (not modified) responses to minimize the number of requests they make for the full feed.
But the primary solution will end up being caching. With the exception of personalized RSS feeds, RSS feeds easily can be cached. Web-based RSS readers like Bloglines and My Yahoo already only read the RSS feed once, cache it, and display it to multiple readers. But popular RSS feeds are also easily proxy cached just like web pages, reducing the load on the original source servers. -
What? Production Standards?
Nah! Tinkering with production code is done by many major coding shops...
Chicago Tribune: Link
Additional: Hasn't missed a paper since the Chicago Fire...All I received Monday was the Business section. Didn't bring the company down...but hurt big!
Sprint: Link
Additional: Sprint had to outsource it because if you own a sprint phone and ever called customer service, half the time they couldn't help you because the computers were down! Almost brought the company down.
A&TT Wireless: Link
Additional: DID bring the company down.
Microsoft: Link
Additional: Brought MANY companies down...
I'm sure I can name more production bungles...Slashdot 503 for an hour isn't a company crasher though.
-Electrawn -
Re:This should go without saying, but ...
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Re:Recall Iridium
Using standard TCP/IP is a non starter
All the existing satellite folks are using methods to overcome TCP/IP's limitations in the high latency satellite environment.
(That's not a particularly good article in terms of getting details right, but it's an okay overview)
- Peter -
Re:No
And Ellen feels she's above the dell dude
Q: Do you feel any connection to the Dell dude?
Ellen: No, none whatsoever. That guy's a doofus. -
Re:About fsking time, but don't hold your breathThen there was SBC's much touted "Project Pronto" that was supposed to bring higher-speed DSL to over 80% of their customers by year-end 2002, but they kept delaying it and, by Early 2002, the writing was pretty much on the wall that SBC had no plans to actually follow through with their promises.
Bully for SBC if they can see this push for fiber through to the end, but their history has shown a decided lack of resolve in this area in the past.
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1595
According to here the total is 1595.
How many settled out of court, like, 1300+?!?! -
Re:Are They In? Or Out?
Still, Siemens supports software patents, and you'd be a damned fool to think that they actually care about the OSS scene any more than they can profit from it.
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Re:Impact on crypto?
The magic of PKI occurs through the use of extremely long prime numbers, called keys. Two keys are involved - a private key, which only you have access to, and a public key, which can be accessed by anyone. The two keys work together, so a message scrambled with the private key can only be unscrambled with the public key and vice versa. The more digits in these keys, the more secure the process. --Public-key encryption for dummies
Not the best explanation, I prefer this -
Re:Too little, too late.like dressing up in a Penguin suit while handing SCO a paper bag full of money under the table
I simply don't understand this fascination with bashing Sun for buying device drivers for Solaris/x86.
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with Microsoft.
Now that Sun is in bed with Microsoft (Java Desktop anyone?), it should be a peice of cake for them to release the obsolete JVM code about 11 months from now.
(yes, I know that is an old link; the point is illustrate how far back Sun was getting nailed by MSFT; a quick slashdot search will show more recently how they're still bent over)
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Re:Over-wired? and tooo far ahead of the curve
So, the fact that I have a 10/100/1000 copper connection means that I can't connect to their network?
I went to Case from 1997-99. At least back then, you are right.
Case was using 155Mb ATM over fiber into each dorm room. I think I still have my PCI ATM adapter somewhere (don't tell anyone, they cost a fortune back then). I believe they boasted the largest ATM installation outside of General Motors. (The fiber has been in place for well over 10 years - I think they chose to install it in 1988.)
Anyway, not everyone could use the fiber directly, (were there ISA ATM cards?) and while I don't recall the details from the time, there was some sort of dongle+packet translation into Ethernet, which played havoc with the overall network traffic regarless of what kind of machine you brought to the party.
I do remember hearing things had changed a bit (I transfered out to NYU) - and here is a good article that seems to discuss a good bit of Case's IT history.
As an aside, CWRU students do put this to work - Hell, I knew someone who got a RIAA letter in 1997 for ftp serving. Even back then, files on the local SMB network would put many P2P systems to shame. To be fair though, there were many who put it to good and innovative use. And if you ever have to deal with ATM and Linux, CWRULUG (though out of date) would be a good place to start.
At Case, its probably only 50% that have no use for Gig Ethernet - and the other half is very happy to take their share of the bandwidth.
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Re:Hand behind the Hatchet?
Any further ideas?
Sun.
It's too direct for Microsoft (and too bungled too). Their FUD engine is well greased and is quite honestly self-perceived to be too above this troll trash to be implicated. Not that there aren't moneys from Allen being moved around on the side, but that's not official Microsoft policy. Granted, Microsoft has admitted
to funding Tocqueville but there's a missing beneficiary.
Sun, on the other hand, is fighting for their life though it's receiving little coverage. Linux has decimated Sun's sales, and their missteps with Java have only frustrated efforts to find a solution - any solution. Perhaps some of the settlement money from Microsoft went here instead of directly to Sun?
Consider: Who does having Linux portrayed as stolen property push the Linux base to?
- FreeBSD/OpenBSD/netBSD? Not at all. If it was impossible for Linux to create Linux and therefore Linux is TheftWare, the *BSDs are next in line for accusations and implications.
- SCO? This fossil? The same fossil one of their largest investors (and slush fund source) says should be canned? The fossil that litigation targets like Daimler Chrysler have confessed to not have used for nearly a decade? Doubtful.
- Apple? A more interesting theory, but OS/X != Intel *NIX.
- Microsoft? They're not at all in position to capture the Intel *NIX market. Convert to XP? How?
Solaris, on the other hand, presents an inviting candidate for migration should the F/OSS *NIX's need a commercial home.
*scoove* -
VoIP, cell phones, conspiracy theoriesI live in the US, so my long-range wireless network alternatives are pretty slim. I currently am getting unlimited GPRS bandwidth through T-Mobile for $20/month. The only problem (other than the meager 2.5kBps) is the consistent 1000ms ping. Does anybody else with GPRS have latency this bad?
1000ms all by itself would effectively kill most use of VoIP, as the noticable delays for some reason causes really annoying conversations... you don't know whether to start respond to what the other person just said, or whether they're going to follow it up with something else, causing you to accidentally start talking over them. Latency is so important to voice calls that the International Telecommunications Union recommends latency no greater than 150ms.
So is this just my conspiracy theory that T-Mobile GPRS provides way worse than 150ms for data, while providing better than 150ms latency for the voice side of things?
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Re:Let's not get cocky, Mr. DellI disagree with you. (I've also got an MBA, as well and I'm an EE -- does that seriously matter to you ?)
I believe your analysis is shallow and hangs on generalizations which are simply wrong. Your comment amounts to what you classify as standard-answer-number-two: (2. That's stupid and shortsighted. ) I thought you were setting yourself up to do better than that.
Let me point out what I think is faulty with your reasoning.
In the short run, the copycats will always eat the innovator's lunch.
In the short run, the copycats will not have moved. They are, after all, still trying to comprehend what they will try to copy (can't copy indiscriminately, there are too many bad ideas out there, too).
In the medium run, however, assuming the copy cat already jumped in the game, they may or may not surpass the innovator. There are examples of innovators keeping the lead, as there are of them losing the lead.
Think Caterpillar.
Think Rank Xerox.
Think, even, HP in the InkJet printer business (still leading).
(...) when the copycats are still ramping up, their quality is poor. Thus, in the old days you would hear, "Spend the money for the HP -- brand X is cheap but sucks." You don't usually hear that, anymore, regarding printers. Sucks for HP.
You assume that the experience curve only benefits quality. Wrong. It also benefits production costs! That means, the first one to launch can also count on developing techniques, processes and scale to keep leading in costs. Will they do it ? Maybe not -- bad management can ruin a company anytime -- but they do have a sustainable advantage.
But here's the kicker: when the Next Big Thing comes around, who will it come from? Dell or HP? Yep, HP.
Wrong. It will probably come from neither ! It so turns out that R&D spending decisions are usually taken into a context which favors perfecting existing technologies, and advancing them to meet existing client needs (see Innovator's Dillema, which makes this absolutely clear). Not even HP or IBM are free from this dynamics Try to read Christensen's book. The next breakthrough, disruptive tech will more likely come from an outsider.
It's the same thing with IBM. IBM has been a leader in nearly every single office productivity market they've competed in for, what, like 50 years?
You have a lot of respect for IBM. But the innovation you admire was not helping, in fact it almost destroyed IBM. The company we love came very, very close to disappearing in the beginning of the 1990s. In 1993 an outsider was hired to lead it out of the red, and made it rethink its "innovation is king" practices. Among other things, Gerstner made it focus on selling, selling, selling. Just like Dell ! A quote from the linked cnet article:(IBM) also was losing market share in a number of key areas. In 1994, for instance, Compaq Computer, the first company to successfully clone the IBM PC, dethroned Big Blue as the world's largest PC maker. Part of the problem lay in the corporate culture, according to various sources. IBM prided itself on innovation and had long allowed executives and employees fairly free rein. "Think," after all, was the company's motto. IBM employees strove for the new, and often disdained using technology from outside sources.
And, by the way, according to Gerstner, IBM's savior himself, the technology which saved IBM was nothing created inhouse.
I think you don't know much about IBM's recent history, let alone the last 50 years.
(...) and the copycats got caught in a mass extinction. It's evolution on a corporate scale, baby.
Poor copyc -
It runs QNXIt's now official. This beast QNX. (Someone else pointed this out, but didn't provide a link.)
There are many QNX machines around, but most of them are "faceless". Railroad switchyard control. Nuclear power plants. Avionics. And now, big routers.
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CISCO Using QNXI think the more interesting story might be what it's running.
QNX Powers Universal Media Gateway for Next-Generation Digital Video Networks
QNX Software Systems today announced that the QNX® Neutrino® realtime operating system (RTOS) will be shipping as part of the Cisco uMG9850 QAM Module, a new quadrature amplitude modulation product designed to let cable operators use Gigabit Ethernet to deliver video-on-demand and other multimedia services efficiently and cost-effectively to TV set-top receivers.'Little OS that could' just might
"In a deal signed two years ago, Cisco (csco) chose QNX as its preferred real-time OS vendor as part of Cisco's 'ongoing efforts to increase the reliability and availability of data-voice-video networks.' Since then, not much seems to have materialized from the partnership."Cisco's HFR is here
"The IOS-XR operating system kernel was acquired from QNX Software Systems, a small Canadian developer of realtime operating system code to companies in the automotive, communications, defense, industrial automation and medical device markets. Cisco already ships QNX operating system code in its uMG9850 QAM digital video module for the Catalyst 4500 Gigabit Ethernet switch."Cisco Unveils the HFR
" The transition is analagous to Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT - message board) moving from DOS-based operating systems to Windows NT, says analyst Stephen Kamman of CIBC World Markets.
Just as NT did, IOS XR could begin trickling down to lower-level systems, eventually permeating Cisco's entire portfolio, including edge and enterprise boxes. "The question is how quickly they can push that software through the product line," Kamman says."
"The software is based on a kernel licensed from QNX Software Systems, but tailored for the job. 'We have made some pretty substantial modifications to [the QNX code] that are Cisco proprietary,' Volpi says."[Disclaimer: This is a very happy QNX Employee.]
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do it yourself DSL
I remember reading an article about DIY DSL here on slashdot a long time ago. I did a simple google search and found an article about a neighbourhood in colorado. verizon wouldn't give them DSL, so they did it themselves.
here's an article about them
and this is the Ruby Ranch Internet Cooperative
i know there's also software that can do DSL with nothing but an old soundcard and two copper wires. i don't know where it is, or if it's still maintained though.
cheers, and good luck. -
Re:Well, that depends.
For the same money you'd spend on a Cisco switch you can probably buy a Nortel that'll run circles around the Cisco.
Or, you could buy a Big Iron switch from Foundry that will blow away most of the offerings from Cisco.
Or, if your tripping over the bags of cash or their just blocking the door, you could spring for a Juniper... -
Cow Doodo
Something smells and for once its not me. Here are some articles by the person that is supposed to have written this.
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The Hatch's making the US safe for Corporations..
Orrin is helping out the RIAA, making sure that the current power structure of the labels & Clear Channel can keep bringing us such fine music.
While his son, Brent, is fighting the legal battles for SCO, to make sure their "IP" is protected. This article discussing the case mentions Brent, as have several subsequent articles and court submission documents.
Thanks guys! -
Jumbo frames?
Perhaps in the upcoming standarization they will finally switch to so called "jumbo frames", aka raise the maximum amount of data that can be sent in one chunk. As the singaling rate has gone up from 10Mb-1Gb, there has been a 100x increase in signaling rate and therefore a 100x decrease in the amount of time it takes one packet to cross the network. Since we are still using the same paltry sizes, cpu usage goes way up and throughput is somewhat capped. Switching to a larger frame size would allow higher throughput and lower CPU utilization. Many networking vendors have started adding support for larger frame sizes into their products for these reasons, but being added to the official standard would greatly increase the adoption of such jumbo frames.
For more info, see:
http://sd.wareonearth.com/~phil/jumbo.html
http://www.psc.edu/~mathis/MTU/
http://www.nwfusion.com/columnists/2004/0105tolly. htm -
Archos created the HD mp3 player
Not Creative. And as to people stealing the iPod look, take a look at the Odyssey 1000, or the Dell DJ, or the Samsung Yepp. Do they look like Creative's player? No, they look like iPods. Display up top, controls (often round) below.
Now look at the user interfaces, except for Rio, they all stole the iPod UI. Look at the Dell DJ, the Samsung Yepp, the Odyssey 1000.
Look at the picture below. See the layout at the top, see the round controls? See the UI? Please try to tell me this is anything but an iPod knockoff?
Odyssey 1000 -
Well, you know what they say,
a fool and his money are soon parted.
You knew something was wrong with this program when quotes from Laura DiDio started popping up. She seems to provide her "insight" for the truly desperate. Indeed, before this praise, it seemed like she was playing good cop/bad cop with them to get more sales for licenses. Judging from this article, I guess it worked. -
Well, you know what they say,
a fool and his money are soon parted.
You knew something was wrong with this program when quotes from Laura DiDio started popping up. She seems to provide her "insight" for the truly desperate. Indeed, before this praise, it seemed like she was playing good cop/bad cop with them to get more sales for licenses. Judging from this article, I guess it worked. -
Re:Hmmm....
Well considering that alpha is a discontinued platform I doubt anyone would be smart to buy one. Furthermore, if this technology is the next evolution of containers (which I think it is) it's nothing like what you speak of. You don't need to maintain a seperate os image for each zone, making administration easy. The only problem I've had with containers is isolation, which I hear has improved with zones. Physical partitioning (domains) have been in the sun product line since the 10k. Try understanding the technology before you comment about it... or more likely, IHBT
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Hardly a big surprise....
... when it was reported last year by ZDNET / news.com / Network Fusion / pcmag... that Microsoft were to buy a Romanian antivirus company !
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Re:Good job Microsoft!
I don't see it. What's to keep them from implementing a broken form of this (or sabotaging it in some way) even though they're a part of it?
It's not like they haven't done it before:
MS stalls IPv6 progress
Microsoft missing browser standards (and they are a member of the W3C)
We all know how they are with standards. -
Re:From Greg over @ OS-News
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Can you say "liars"...
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Re:Sun is a friend of open source?
Then perhaps someone will explain being why Sun paid SCO $8M for a worthless SCO licence (along with Microsoft, themselves no friend of OS).
Sun didn't buy a worthless license. SCO has an implementation of driver technology that Sun needed in their bid to revitalize Solaris on X86 processors. In fact, they picked up hundreds of drivers. Now, if you have any suggestions as to other System V Unixes on X86 with a large base of relatively recent drivers and driver technology that Sun could have used instead, I'm sure that Sun would love to hear about it. Until then, Sun has a real business to run, and buying IP from SCO no doubt saved them an enormous amount of time, and maybe even money.
Bottom line: this has nothing to do with SCO attacking Linux. Sun was just taking care of business.
(By the way, you do know that Sun has deals to sell something on the order of 500,000 - 1,000,000 of the Linux based Java Desktop systems a year, don't you? You do know that Sun sells servers with Linux, don't you?)
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I did some checkingHere is an announcement of Novell selling Unixware to oldSCO. Note:
Unixware has never achieved a substantial market share
Another quote, again no mention of _copyrights_
X/Open introduces the UNIX 95 branding programme. Novell sells UnixWare business to SCO
nwfusion makes this interesting distinction:
1992 - Purchases rights to AT&T UNIX
1995 - Sells Unixware to Santa Cruz Operation
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mod parent up informative -- looks real.
Or mod me, 'cause I took the time to make a link.
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Re:So...I actually read the ad....
I wonder - did they use people who had no experience with windows to compare against the support costs for people who had no experience with linux?Given that a windows desktop server can cost several thousands of dollars to buy software for, before you pay someone to actually install and configure it, are they saying it cost them several thousanddollars to get the linux server working?
Takes me less than a day to get a working, configured server linux server... (two if I download all the software).
Ongoing costs? Yes, they did have to read the manual for the linux software... But i'd have to read the manual for the Windows software if I wanted a non-default config.
As for the "case studies" I wonder how much it cost M$ to send someone out to walk them through the changeover? Might not have cost that customer, but It sure didn't come out of Bill's pocket!
Interesting Facts: Giga Research is a wholly owned subsidiary of Forrester Research, who changed their policy on paid-for product comparisons as a result of at least a similar study, if not the one touted in the advert.
In their defence (or perhaps not), Forrester did find that MP3s are good for the music industry...
Meta Group will say anything: (not that I don't like the idea, but wouldn't you try to "correct" a firm saying this about you?)
By 2006 or 2007 Linux will be running on 45% of new server
again on eeek (I notice that has a HP ad on it) er, eWeek - but I like the typo better :-)IDC - well.... IDC: Microsoft breakup would benefit the industry and a quote from here
"IDC has also published research in the past that shows some companies replacing Unix systems with Linux can save twice as much as those that move from Unix to Windows". -
Raymond is doing it
Eric Raymond has mentioned on a number of occasions, here and elsewhere, that he has legitimate copies of several historic Unix source trees and that he's compared them to Linux. He's also developed an automated comparison process for just such applications. See this NWFusion article for example.
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Re:Where will they find the Frequency
This will be using licensed frequency blocks, and won't interfer with the 2.4GHz unlicensed frequences used by 802.11.
All this really is, is warmed over MMDS. MMDS was going to be the next big thing in the 90's - Sprint, in particular, was active in MMDS (you might remember it was called Sprint ION). As with a lot of new technologies, it was rolled out into a few markets, lost a lot of money, and was shut down.
Flash forward a couple of years - 802.11b/g (WiFi) is hot (hence the name - WiMax), broadband Internet usage popular, and the equipment is better/cheaper, so wireless companies are going to give it another go - except this time it will be sold as broadband Internet + VOIP, instead of a replacement for cable TV and also broadband Internet.
From browsing the user reports in the DSL Reports forum, it looks like, despite Sprint's best efforts to feck it up, most people really were happy with their ION performance, and very sad to see it shut off.