You mean the MySQL that's licensed under the GPL [mysql.com]? That MySQL?
Maybe he's thinking about InstantDB, that was never open source but free and very useful for embedded Java systems to name but one application. InstantDB got swallowed up and dissapeared in the Lutris black hole. It is a shame that the code doesn't even seem available commercially.
The idea is that others will download this file because they think it is the song they are looking for. And then, if they don't realize it and remove the file immediately, others can download the file from their node. The idea is that if you get the "poisoned" file spread to enough nodes it will become nearly impossible to locate a "non-poisoned" file. The goal, of course, is to make it so hard to find these files that nobody bothers.
Have you actually tried this? I have with Kazaa and it is not that easy. I suspect that most people delete bad files, so that badly defective files get overwhelmed by good files. My experience is that outside of Movies where people often don't understand how to use the DivX compression there is a lot of good quality music and software being traded.
It is a bit like building a defective clone of a fish and hoping it will mate with the other fish and kill them off, in fact the other fish either avoid it or it dies off before it can reproduce.
So I don't believe that the RIAA will succeed in poisoning P2P networks. They may find other ways, but I think they would need vaste resources and a bit more intelligence than they have shown so far.
The downside of telecommuting is that you actually have to work instead of just wondering around the office with a notepad in your hand pretending to work as most people do.
Check out Elance, maybe this is the future of software development? Just put the specs for your company's new project online and wait for some eager beavers from Bangalore to code it for 3 Rupees an hour. There will be work in producing specifications that will in some way corresponed to the desired outcome, something I've not seen at any company I've worked at for a long time now.
> I disagree with software piracy, and stealing music online; I occasionally do download MP3s, I won't deny it; just as I drank alcohol when I was under 18 (UK)
Drinking alcohol under 18 is not illegal in the UK. It is illegal to serve alcohol to under 18 year olds in licensed premises.
> these files are never on my HDD for too long (I think the record is about a week)
> But this is qualitatively and quantatively very different from/. virtually advocating pirating software worth several thousand pounds.
You are correct,/. isn't breaking the law but you are. You are stealing MP3s online,/. isn't doing anything illegal. Not only that but you've just fessed up to it in front of the millions (well a few dozen)/. readers. You need a better grip legal and illegal I think. Doh!
"Microsoft's rival browser, Internet Explorer, by contrast, has an estimated 96% of the market..."
This is simply not true, I'm sure that web marker firmscould give us more reliable stats. The first thing is you need is a browser neutral site, if your site doesn't permit anything other than IE the stats will be screwed.
because everyone sets their browser ident to IE...
I don't believe this. I bet 1% of browser users do this. I did a quick poll of the techies on my floor, out of 20 people 2 knew it was possible and 1 had done it. That's amongst techies.
> The more developers that you have working on a project, the more likely it is to be completed and delivered on time. In fact software engineering literature from The Mythical Man-Month on comes to exactly the opposite conclusion.
In fact Brooks said that adding manpower to a late project makes it even later . He never said don't start out with enough programmers to complete the project in a reasonable amount of time. There is a huge difference in the two concepts. Brooks experience was with the late running OS360, adding programmers at a late stage in a development can't simply be done on the basis of remaining Man Months (hence the book title) as each programmer needs to be integrated and trained. And additional programmers increase the lines of communications in an existing team structure.
Now you could argue that beyond a certain size, like Brook's seminal OS360 project, the team is just too large to function and the project should be rescoped as a series of smaller developments.
You could even use this idea to refactor your late running project to farm out islands of work to new teams with limited impact on the existing developers. For example the section "internalization" could be branched from the main project and given to a new team with the corresponding benefits on the delivery schedule.
In short, your project should have the correct number and mix of developers to achieve its goals.
If it starts to run late, rescope.
Unfortunately all this requires management skills quite beyond the average pointy head.
Managers spend money on projects because they often have a certain annual budget. They may be presented with three similar solutions and go for the most expensive because they may feel more comfortable with the supplier (something economists might term 'goodwill'). If their annual budget allows the spend it is not a problem. A manager would sooner spend twice as much money and have more assurance that the project will be successful and that he won't get fired!
Spending obscene amounts of money is also part of a manager's job. It gives them a feeling of self-worth. Just like a geek buying the latest quad processor Linux box. You don't need it but it is nice to spend money on things, epecially other people's.
It is not always like this. Government departments are notorious for taking the lowest bidder even when it doesn't make good sense. The big consultancies know how to play this game and put in very low bids but with very tight requirements. They know that they can make all the money back and then some on all the requirements changes the civil servants will make.
Some low bids are silly and show a lack of understanding of the complexity of the project. In the UK there is a famous project called the London
Ambulance Service. The mission critical emergency service contract was given to a bidder an order of magnitude lower than the principle bids. The supplier did not grasp the complexity and mission critical nature of running an ambulance system. The result were a number of deaths as the system collapsed under the load. This failure has been very well documented in project management litterature and nobody wants to go there again.
Often big companies will win 'zero cost' bids in an order to freeze out the little guys. In 1995 my Internet startup put in a bid to build a small web site for a publisher (Letts). We quoted $8,000 dollars only to have a big multinational quote $0!. The multinational wanted to build a Web team, but we looked at their proposal and they had no understanding of the Web, it was rubbish. The client said 'you can't argue with $0' can you? Well you can if it is rubbish but whatever.
So in conclusion it is easy to look at your failure and draw the conclusion that only high price bids will win. But often there is a lot more invovled in the decision process than that. Also never underestimate the stupidity of the person making the purchasing decision.
If all that fails, try bribery. According to the accepted measures the US is quite low down on the bribery scale but in some countries it is the only way to win contracts. The cost reflects the amount of 'consultancy' you paid to the manager in the client firm.
PostgreSQL was insane. I tried to get it to work on my box, and I'm a C programmer with many years of experience in understanding other people's code and installation systems.
Unless they broke something I find your story difficult to believe. I used PostgresQL in 1998 (version 5.x) for the RDBMS for Racal Telecomms ISP configuration system. I built and installed the database from scratch in a day for Slowlaris 2.5.
Our experiences with PostgresSQL were largely positive for an open source database. For the scale of our project it was ideal and the database seems to have progressed in leaps and bounds since.
But IT depts will still go Oracle because it is a sought after skill on the jobs market and because their salesgirls wear short skirts and have big hooters and give good head (allegedly). Most managers prefer that to spotty geeks telling them how incredibly lame they are to use Oracle for the company time sheet system.
You would only win the Darwin award if you strapped a Scramjet to the back of your Chevy Impala and took the car out to the desert for a test drive I think.
I would be happy to but Sun's lawyers are extremely extremely efficient. If you haven't had to deal with them then you may not realise this.
The case I'm talking about is a friend of mine who HR in Santa Clara took a dislike to (they didn't like his timekeeping which was fairly nocturnal). An incident occured in the offices for which there were witnesses saying that the perp was an Hispanic speaking motobike courier. My friend did not fit the description and did not do the crime. The Santa Clara sherrifs dept. in cahoots with Sun's HR department worked together to ensure that my friend was unable to defend himself and to fabricate evidence against my friend. My friend's back pay was also frozen to make sure he didn't have enough funds to arrange bail or defend himself.
I can't offer you any specific proof, as you will know without discovery of emails (who keeps those anymore), tapping phone conversations etc it is very hard to prove my allegations but what I say is true.
I have to point out that Scott McNeally (from whom we tried to enlist support) was quite peturbed by what was happening but is seems there was some kind of disconnect between him and Sun's legal and HR departments.
They puny brains behind the Santa Clara sherrif's department reckoned without the resourcefulness of the hacker community and we were able to spring my friend from jail. Of course he is now a fugitive from justice (well Californian justice at any rate) and is unable to clear his name without risking a 25 year jail term.
But without funds and a good legal team you are almost certain to do time or have to plea bargain. Just the arraignment (preperation and hearing) cost $25,000 in legal fees. My friend's bail was set at $1million, more than for OJ Simpson!
All this for a fabricated and trumped up charge.
You may well be wondering what is in it for the Santa Clara country sherrifs department? Well they receive $260 per week (or is it day?, forget which) for each inmate in their jails from federal funds. But their jails are such human rights contravening shitholes that it only costs them $130 for each prisonner. Easy money.
So I don't want to hear stories of what angels Sun our. I can't imagine even Microsoft throwing one of their employees to the dogs like that.
Well the only problem with statistics like these is that they hide the browsers that are passing "Microsoft 5.5" or some such crap
Yes I agree with the old adage about statistics and there is only one thing more annoying than this site prefers MS Explorer and that is some site that boots you out if you havn't become part of the M$ Hive.
However I bet that there are not that many people who do the same as you... If you ask 100 web surfers if they have changed the HTTP headers or even if they know what goes on between the browser and server I bet only 1 would be able to tell you. So I figure that for a none-geek site like mine (skiing) the results are probably not that far off. I'd be interested to hear other stats or opinons though.
This still means that Mozilla needs to go a long way to get market share by traditional organic means. It will need AOL or Compaq or someone to bootstrap it.
Personally it annoys me that I can't expunge that Internet Explorer from my desktop (NT 4.0, it is the corporate standard as is IE at my company) and replace it with Mozilla. And I still don't understand what are the incredible technical reasons are for discombobulating the OS from the Browser.
So I still think that Microsoft has an armlock on the browser marketplace.
Does this matter? Not really sure myself. Other than if M$ have a total monopoly supported by law then they can stop me running Mozilla because it won't get signed off to run on my Palladium enabled box.
Seems that the older missions ("Fly that way until your battery runs out") were purposefully vague and required a spacecraft with a higher amount of durability due to the squishiness of the mission.
The Voyager missions were involved in the once in 200 years alignment of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Venus in order to do a grand fly-by. This was a very important alignment of those planets using their gravity fields to increase acceleration so as to complete the next leg in less time. It was extremely important that Voyager did not fail en-route and their were many unknowns such as whether it was possible to fly through the rings of Saturn (it isn't and Voyager II was reprogrammed at the 11 hour to avoid them!).
I really think criticizing Voyager on grounds of costs shows a lack of understanding of the program. They certainly were not 'fly that way until the battery runs out missions'. Can you imagine the engineering and maths involved to fly a spacecraft millions of miles and have it arrive at a certain point within a second?
Hat's off to the guys who set up and ran and saw through those missions. Voyager gave us invaluable data on the planets and a unique insight into how the earth may have been formed.
On a scale of 1 to 10 on the old evil scale (10 being reserved for the devil) and sun ranks maybe 3 or 4.
More like 8.5, I assume you've never had a visit from Sun's lawyers?
Or been fitted up for a serious criminal offence carrying a 25 year jail term by their personnel department, having all your back pay friezed so you can't even make bail or hire a lawyer. Then spending 3 months in a Santa Clara jail cell before being lucky enough to escape.
Oh, yes, Sun are just as evil as Microsoft, perhaps even more so if you are an employee. They just havn't managed to wangle themselves into a monopoly position.
As a full-time Mozilla user (including mail and news) it is good that they are moving to 1.1. I'm not really interested in Beta testing and endless/. posts about RC1, RC2, RC3 are a bit of a yawn to be honest, can't someone mod Timothy down:-). Still it will be really cool when they get to 1.1, I still have 1 or two annoying bugs like not being able to enter a URL sometimes or total system lockups on NT.
That said it is far and away a better browser than IE , I have much more control over what the browser does - now I can surf without getting bizziollions of pr0n sites popping up all over the place. Plays havock with the corporate browser log.... pointy haired manager comes by - "David, from the logs you surfed 27 porn sites between 10.33 and 10.55 on Wednesday morning". Doh!
But what is Mozilla's market share? Still almost zero. From my web site this was the breakdown for June (see below). This is from a ski website. So until Netscape breaks the desktop monolopy and starts getting pre-installed the road to market share looks very long indeed.
Yes, exactly, if anyone had bothered to read the link posted to the New Scientist story they would have seen just that, unfortunately for some/. readers this is a write-only medium. Sigh.
You first of all have to ask what the Chinese government wants. This is much that same as most other governments. A platform to enable civil servants to perform word processing and accounting type tasks. Ergo China will be producing a Chinese Government oriented distro of Linux without Quake and all the other frippery. Can't see why they want to run Office 2000... suspect that is just journo's getting the story wrong.
Some/. hackers... fuelled on Jolt and Star Wars see everything as some Jihad against Microsoft rather than realising that there are people out there who just want to get on with their jobs.
Splutter, Moz will run like a 1 legged dog on your puny laptop.
Get yourself a decent system... 1 Gig Athlon or something and help US industry in the process by spending a bit of money.
Re:A revered teacher and researcher
on
Forbes on Linux
·
· Score: 1
(Bolosky and another one that escapes me)
You are probably thinking about Richard Draves. Microsoft have also hired Mr Quicksort and CSP himself Charlie Hoare. In fact they are hiring just about anyone of talent they can persuade to take Bill's shilling (note that Avie didn't get hired:-). Don't expect to see much out of them though.
There are some mobile phones coming out this year with Polymer screens. The display is really really sharp on them. Ok the Telco's wet dream of everyone watching pay per view movies on their phone handsets over GPRS is daft but the display clarity really blew me away, you can read them from any angle too. Which may not be good for computers but is great for TVs.
Oh they are currently using glass rather than plastic so they will break if you try to roll them.
The challenge is to reach 100,000 hours for TV use (this is the standard for CRTs). There was an article on BBC Click Online saying they hoped to reach this target in 5 years.
I was working for Siemens at the time as a young Unix hacker (siesoft.co.uk).
The Morris worm was slowed down by the speed of the Internet... we had a 64kbps connection to ICL. We managed to pull our link to the next before we got affected. It was really quite exciting at the time, following the Usenet links as people pulled the Morris worm apart and analysed it byte by byte.
In the end we were probably affected for around 3 days. We first realised there was a problem as Usenet dried up... we used to take all newsgroups with a feed of around 1000 posts per day! This slowed to a trickle during the 'attack'.
Things got back to normal again as you really had to have people who knew what they were doing to get Unix and Vax systems on the 'net back then. Also there were nowhere near as many wankers online, even as a % of the total population. We were there in a spirit of cooperation and discovery. Happy days.
Slashdot Mirror
"go on, try it, the first hit is for free sonny, you know you'll like it"
What a disgraceful advert!
Maybe he's thinking about InstantDB, that was never open source but free and very useful for embedded Java systems to name but one application. InstantDB got swallowed up and dissapeared in the Lutris black hole. It is a shame that the code doesn't even seem available commercially.
David
Have you actually tried this? I have with Kazaa and it is not that easy. I suspect that most people delete bad files, so that badly defective files get overwhelmed by good files. My experience is that outside of Movies where people often don't understand how to use the DivX compression there is a lot of good quality music and software being traded.
It is a bit like building a defective clone of a fish and hoping it will mate with the other fish and kill them off, in fact the other fish either avoid it or it dies off before it can reproduce.
So I don't believe that the RIAA will succeed in poisoning P2P networks. They may find other ways, but I think they would need vaste resources and a bit more intelligence than they have shown so far.
David
Is Mozart still in copyright?
David
Check out Elance, maybe this is the future of software development? Just put the specs for your company's new project online and wait for some eager beavers from Bangalore to code it for 3 Rupees an hour. There will be work in producing specifications that will in some way corresponed to the desired outcome, something I've not seen at any company I've worked at for a long time now.
David
Drinking alcohol under 18 is not illegal in the UK. It is illegal to serve alcohol to under 18 year olds in licensed premises.
> these files are never on my HDD for too long (I think the record is about a week)
> But this is qualitatively and quantatively very different from /. virtually advocating pirating software worth several thousand pounds.
You are correct, /. isn't breaking the law but you are. You are stealing MP3s online, /. isn't doing anything illegal. Not only that but you've just fessed up to it in front of the millions (well a few dozen) /. readers. You need a better grip legal and illegal I think. Doh!
David
This is simply not true, I'm sure that web marker firmscould give us more reliable stats. The first thing is you need is a browser neutral site, if your site doesn't permit anything other than IE the stats will be screwed.
My site has the following stats:
because everyone sets their browser ident to IE...
I don't believe this. I bet 1% of browser users do this. I did a quick poll of the techies on my floor, out of 20 people 2 knew it was possible and 1 had done it. That's amongst techies.
In fact Brooks said that adding manpower to a late project makes it even later . He never said don't start out with enough programmers to complete the project in a reasonable amount of time. There is a huge difference in the two concepts. Brooks experience was with the late running OS360, adding programmers at a late stage in a development can't simply be done on the basis of remaining Man Months (hence the book title) as each programmer needs to be integrated and trained. And additional programmers increase the lines of communications in an existing team structure.
Now you could argue that beyond a certain size, like Brook's seminal OS360 project, the team is just too large to function and the project should be rescoped as a series of smaller developments.
You could even use this idea to refactor your late running project to farm out islands of work to new teams with limited impact on the existing developers. For example the section "internalization" could be branched from the main project and given to a new team with the corresponding benefits on the delivery schedule.
In short, your project should have the correct number and mix of developers to achieve its goals. If it starts to run late, rescope.
Unfortunately all this requires management skills quite beyond the average pointy head.
David
Spending obscene amounts of money is also part of a manager's job. It gives them a feeling of self-worth. Just like a geek buying the latest quad processor Linux box. You don't need it but it is nice to spend money on things, epecially other people's.
It is not always like this. Government departments are notorious for taking the lowest bidder even when it doesn't make good sense. The big consultancies know how to play this game and put in very low bids but with very tight requirements. They know that they can make all the money back and then some on all the requirements changes the civil servants will make.
Some low bids are silly and show a lack of understanding of the complexity of the project. In the UK there is a famous project called the London Ambulance Service. The mission critical emergency service contract was given to a bidder an order of magnitude lower than the principle bids. The supplier did not grasp the complexity and mission critical nature of running an ambulance system. The result were a number of deaths as the system collapsed under the load. This failure has been very well documented in project management litterature and nobody wants to go there again.
Often big companies will win 'zero cost' bids in an order to freeze out the little guys. In 1995 my Internet startup put in a bid to build a small web site for a publisher (Letts). We quoted $8,000 dollars only to have a big multinational quote $0!. The multinational wanted to build a Web team, but we looked at their proposal and they had no understanding of the Web, it was rubbish. The client said 'you can't argue with $0' can you? Well you can if it is rubbish but whatever.
So in conclusion it is easy to look at your failure and draw the conclusion that only high price bids will win. But often there is a lot more invovled in the decision process than that. Also never underestimate the stupidity of the person making the purchasing decision.
If all that fails, try bribery. According to the accepted measures the US is quite low down on the bribery scale but in some countries it is the only way to win contracts. The cost reflects the amount of 'consultancy' you paid to the manager in the client firm.
David
Now I thought Apache were the Microsoft of Open Source.
Unless they broke something I find your story difficult to believe. I used PostgresQL in 1998 (version 5.x) for the RDBMS for Racal Telecomms ISP configuration system. I built and installed the database from scratch in a day for Slowlaris 2.5.
Our experiences with PostgresSQL were largely positive for an open source database. For the scale of our project it was ideal and the database seems to have progressed in leaps and bounds since.
But IT depts will still go Oracle because it is a sought after skill on the jobs market and because their salesgirls wear short skirts and have big hooters and give good head (allegedly). Most managers prefer that to spotty geeks telling them how incredibly lame they are to use Oracle for the company time sheet system.
David
Yeah, yeah, I know he posted this article, QED.
David
You would only win the Darwin award if you strapped a Scramjet to the back of your Chevy Impala and took the car out to the desert for a test drive I think.
David
Maybe, at the same time, they should hook it up to that Boeing anti-gravity thingy they are working on out at area 52?
I would be happy to but Sun's lawyers are extremely extremely efficient. If you haven't had to deal with them then you may not realise this.
The case I'm talking about is a friend of mine who HR in Santa Clara took a dislike to (they didn't like his timekeeping which was fairly nocturnal). An incident occured in the offices for which there were witnesses saying that the perp was an Hispanic speaking motobike courier. My friend did not fit the description and did not do the crime. The Santa Clara sherrifs dept. in cahoots with Sun's HR department worked together to ensure that my friend was unable to defend himself and to fabricate evidence against my friend. My friend's back pay was also frozen to make sure he didn't have enough funds to arrange bail or defend himself.
I can't offer you any specific proof, as you will know without discovery of emails (who keeps those anymore), tapping phone conversations etc it is very hard to prove my allegations but what I say is true.
I have to point out that Scott McNeally (from whom we tried to enlist support) was quite peturbed by what was happening but is seems there was some kind of disconnect between him and Sun's legal and HR departments.
They puny brains behind the Santa Clara sherrif's department reckoned without the resourcefulness of the hacker community and we were able to spring my friend from jail. Of course he is now a fugitive from justice (well Californian justice at any rate) and is unable to clear his name without risking a 25 year jail term.
But without funds and a good legal team you are almost certain to do time or have to plea bargain. Just the arraignment (preperation and hearing) cost $25,000 in legal fees. My friend's bail was set at $1million, more than for OJ Simpson!
All this for a fabricated and trumped up charge.
You may well be wondering what is in it for the Santa Clara country sherrifs department? Well they receive $260 per week (or is it day?, forget which) for each inmate in their jails from federal funds. But their jails are such human rights contravening shitholes that it only costs them $130 for each prisonner. Easy money.
So I don't want to hear stories of what angels Sun our. I can't imagine even Microsoft throwing one of their employees to the dogs like that.
David
Yes I agree with the old adage about statistics and there is only one thing more annoying than this site prefers MS Explorer and that is some site that boots you out if you havn't become part of the M$ Hive.
However I bet that there are not that many people who do the same as you... If you ask 100 web surfers if they have changed the HTTP headers or even if they know what goes on between the browser and server I bet only 1 would be able to tell you. So I figure that for a none-geek site like mine (skiing) the results are probably not that far off. I'd be interested to hear other stats or opinons though.
This still means that Mozilla needs to go a long way to get market share by traditional organic means. It will need AOL or Compaq or someone to bootstrap it.
Personally it annoys me that I can't expunge that Internet Explorer from my desktop (NT 4.0, it is the corporate standard as is IE at my company) and replace it with Mozilla. And I still don't understand what are the incredible technical reasons are for discombobulating the OS from the Browser.
So I still think that Microsoft has an armlock on the browser marketplace.
Does this matter? Not really sure myself. Other than if M$ have a total monopoly supported by law then they can stop me running Mozilla because it won't get signed off to run on my Palladium enabled box.
DavidThe Voyager missions were involved in the once in 200 years alignment of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Venus in order to do a grand fly-by. This was a very important alignment of those planets using their gravity fields to increase acceleration so as to complete the next leg in less time. It was extremely important that Voyager did not fail en-route and their were many unknowns such as whether it was possible to fly through the rings of Saturn (it isn't and Voyager II was reprogrammed at the 11 hour to avoid them!).
I really think criticizing Voyager on grounds of costs shows a lack of understanding of the program. They certainly were not 'fly that way until the battery runs out missions'. Can you imagine the engineering and maths involved to fly a spacecraft millions of miles and have it arrive at a certain point within a second?
Hat's off to the guys who set up and ran and saw through those missions. Voyager gave us invaluable data on the planets and a unique insight into how the earth may have been formed.
David
More like 8.5, I assume you've never had a visit from Sun's lawyers?
Or been fitted up for a serious criminal offence carrying a 25 year jail term by their personnel department, having all your back pay friezed so you can't even make bail or hire a lawyer. Then spending 3 months in a Santa Clara jail cell before being lucky enough to escape.
Oh, yes, Sun are just as evil as Microsoft, perhaps even more so if you are an employee. They just havn't managed to wangle themselves into a monopoly position.
David
As a full-time Mozilla user (including mail and news) it is good that they are moving to 1.1. I'm not really interested in Beta testing and endless /. posts about RC1, RC2, RC3 are a bit of a yawn to be honest, can't someone mod Timothy down :-). Still it will be really cool when they get to 1.1, I still have 1 or two annoying bugs like not being able to enter a URL sometimes or total system lockups on NT.
That said it is far and away a better browser than IE , I have much more control over what the browser does - now I can surf without getting bizziollions of pr0n sites popping up all over the place. Plays havock with the corporate browser log.... pointy haired manager comes by - "David, from the logs you surfed 27 porn sites between 10.33 and 10.55 on Wednesday morning". Doh!
But what is Mozilla's market share? Still almost zero. From my web site this was the breakdown for June (see below). This is from a ski website. So until Netscape breaks the desktop monolopy and starts getting pre-installed the road to market share looks very long indeed.
(www.pistehors.com - June 2002)
Microsoft 6.0 35.88 %
Microsoft 5.5 16.87 %
Microsoft 5.01 11.17 %
Microsoft 5.0 9.14 %
Netscape 5.0 7.87 %
Microsoft 4.01 4.46 %
Netscape 4.79 1.75 %
Netscape Compatible 2.0 1.59 %
Netscape 4.77 1.54 %
Netscape Compatible 3.01 1.27 %
Netscape 4.7 1.17 %
Netscape 4.76 1.12 %
Netscape 4.75 0.92 %
Netscape 4.78 0.80 %
Microsoft 5.13 0.65 %
Netscape 4.5 0.57 %
Netscape 6.2.1 0.48 %
Netscape 6.2 0.37 %
Netscape 4.72 0.27 %
Microsoft 4.5 0.27 %
Netscape Compatible 5.0 0.25 %
Netscape 4.61 0.22 %
Microsoft 5.14 0.20 %
Netscape 4.73 0.18 %
Netscape 4.6 0.15 %
Netscape 6.1 0.15 %
Netscape 6.2.2 0.10 %
Netscape 4.08 0.08 %
Netscape 4.51 0.08 %
Opera 6.01 0.05 %
Microsoft 5.12 0.03 %
Netscape 4.71 0.03 %
Netscape 4.74 0.03 %
ia_archiver 0.03 %
Netscape 4.06 0.03 %
Netscape 6.2.3 0.02 %
Netscape Compatible 4.0 0.02 %
Netscape Compatible 4.5 0.02 %
Netscape 3.01 0.02 %
Netscape Compatible 3.04 0.02 %
Netscape 4.04 0.02 %
Opera 6.0 0.02 %
Opera 5.0 0.02 %
iCab/2.7.1 0.02 %
Netscape 6.01 0.02 %
Netscape 6.0 0.02 %
Netscape 4.0 0.02 %
Netscape 3.0 0.02 %
Good post and a sanity check.
Yes, exactly, if anyone had bothered to read the link posted to the New Scientist story they would have seen just that, unfortunately for some /. readers this is a write-only medium. Sigh.
You first of all have to ask what the Chinese government wants. This is much that same as most other governments. A platform to enable civil servants to perform word processing and accounting type tasks. Ergo China will be producing a Chinese Government oriented distro of Linux without Quake and all the other frippery. Can't see why they want to run Office 2000... suspect that is just journo's getting the story wrong.
Some /. hackers... fuelled on Jolt and Star Wars see everything as some Jihad against Microsoft rather than realising that there are people out there who just want to get on with their jobs.
David
Get yourself a decent system... 1 Gig Athlon or something and help US industry in the process by spending a bit of money.
You are probably thinking about Richard Draves. Microsoft have also hired Mr Quicksort and CSP himself Charlie Hoare. In fact they are hiring just about anyone of talent they can persuade to take Bill's shilling (note that Avie didn't get hired :-). Don't expect to see much out of them though.
There are some mobile phones coming out this year with Polymer screens. The display is really really sharp on them. Ok the Telco's wet dream of everyone watching pay per view movies on their phone handsets over GPRS is daft but the display clarity really blew me away, you can read them from any angle too. Which may not be good for computers but is great for TVs.
Oh they are currently using glass rather than plastic so they will break if you try to roll them.
The challenge is to reach 100,000 hours for TV use (this is the standard for CRTs). There was an article on BBC Click Online saying they hoped to reach this target in 5 years.
I was working for Siemens at the time as a young Unix hacker (siesoft.co.uk).
The Morris worm was slowed down by the speed of the Internet... we had a 64kbps connection to ICL. We managed to pull our link to the next before we got affected. It was really quite exciting at the time, following the Usenet links as people pulled the Morris worm apart and analysed it byte by byte.
In the end we were probably affected for around 3 days. We first realised there was a problem as Usenet dried up... we used to take all newsgroups with a feed of around 1000 posts per day! This slowed to a trickle during the 'attack'.
Things got back to normal again as you really had to have people who knew what they were doing to get Unix and Vax systems on the 'net back then. Also there were nowhere near as many wankers online, even as a % of the total population. We were there in a spirit of cooperation and discovery. Happy days.
David