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Government Brings Antitrust Actions Against Rambus, Micron
A Happy Plague writes "I work at a hedge fund and one of the nice ammenities are real time news tickers. At 11:34 EDT, a nice red line scrolled on my screen.."FTC Alleges Rambus Violates Antitrust Laws". The headlines followed..."...Anticompetitive Acts... Deceived standard setting organization...never acknowledged patents... deceptive conduct..."
Too bad it takes a long time fo bureacracies to work, but they usually come around. Yahoo News has the story." Of course all rambus has to do now is buy a president to get out from under this. In related news, Tricot writes "Over at Salon, there is a newswire article claiming that the justice department is investigating memory chip maker Micron for anti-competitive practices. Wow, if it's a monopoly, then it certainly hasn't hurt prices."
I work as a consultant for several fortune 500 companies, and I think I can shed a little light on the climate of the open source community at the moment. I believe that part of the reason that open source based startups are failing left and right is not an issue of marketing as it's commonly believed but more of an issue of the underlying technology.
I know that that's a strong statement to make, but I have evidence to back it up! At one of the major corps(5000+ employees) that I consult for, we wanted to integrate Linux into our server pool. The allure of not having to pay any restrictive licensing fees was too great to ignore. I reccomended the installation of several boxes running the new 2.4.9 kernel, and my hopes were high that it would perform up to snuff with the Windows 2k boxes which were(and still are!) doing an AMAZING job at their respective tasks of serving HTTP requests, DNS, and fileserving.
I consider myself to be very technically inclined having programmed in VB for the last 8 years doing kernel level programming. I don't believe in C programming because contrary to popular belief, VB can go just as low level as C and the newest VB compiler generates code that's every bit as fast. I took it upon myself to configure the system from scratch and even used an optimised version of gcc 3.1 to increase the execution speed of the binaries. I integrated the 3 machines I had configured into the server pool, and I'd have to say the results were less than impressive... We all know that linux isn't even close to being ready for the desktop, but I had heard that it was supposed to perform decently as a "server" based operating system. The 3 machines all went into swap immediately, and it was obvious that they weren't going to be able to handle the load in this "enterprise" environment. After running for less than 24 hours, 2 of them had experienced kernel panics caused by Bind and Apache crashing! Granted, Apache is a volunteer based project written by weekend hackers in their spare time while Microsft's IIS has an actual professional full fledged development team devoted to it. Not to mention the fact that the Linux kernel itself lacks any support for any type of journaled filesystem, memory protection, SMP support, etc, but I thought that since Linux is based on such "old" technology that it would run with some level of stability. After several days of this type of behaviour, we decided to reinstall windows 2k on the boxes to make sure it wasn't a hardware problem that was causing things to go wrong. The machines instantly shaped up and were seamlessly reintegrated into the server pool with just one Win2K machine doing more work than all 3 of the Linux boxes.
Needless to say, I won't be reccomending Linux/FSF to anymore of my clients. I'm dissappointed that they won't be able to leverege the free cost of Linux to their advantage, but in this case I suppose the old adage stands true that, "you get what you pay for." I would have also liked to have access to the source code of the applications that we're running on our mission critical systems; however, from the looks of it, the Microsoft "shared source" program seems to offer all of the same freedoms as the GPL.
As things stand now, I can understand using Linux in academia to compile simple "Hello World" style programs and learn C programming, but I'm afraid that for anything more than a hobby OS, Windows 98/NT/2K are your only choices.
thank you.
Last night I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas I'll never know.
right up the man CLIT
#include int main(){ printf("FP for the CLIT\n"); return 0; }
vodka, straight up, thank you!
check out this hot little blonde vixen!
she's totally babelicious!
but they grind to a fine dust.
:)
Thus, spammers should beware the FTC.
--
# Canmephians for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.net";
Buy computer from walmart with mandrake Linux installed.
Buy another computer from walmart with Windows XP installed.
Buy a digital camera, perhaps a Kodak.
Take a picture with the camera.
Now, plug camera in to Windows XP box. A simple wizard appears that lets you transfer the pictures, print them or send them to get developed.
Now, plug in camera to Linux box. Nothing happens.
Windows XP once again much easier to use than Linux.
Isn't it pretty bad, that a comment like this can be made and many people, myself included, would agree to how right it is? If you calculate how much money is given to PAC's etc., than you might be able to argue that the United States has one of the most corrupt governments in the world. Depending on who you paid and how much you paid, you do or don't get attention for your problems and a listening ear for your ideas. Now, Western countries (yes, other democratic countries also have this problem) might say to third world countries that they need to do something about corruption, and rightfully so, but the democratic West needs to watch out they don't fall into the same pitfalls.
A government shouldn't let its policies to be determined by the amount of money that has been given to them. But hey, you may say that I'm a dreamer
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