Whoa! Check out what the Jar Jargonizer translate's "Microsoft" to. I typed kmfms. com into the url translator and was pretty surprised at what it spat out. Jar Jar is growing on me.
Oh, dear. Wasn't Metcalfe the guy who predicted the collapse of the Internet? If he is, I wonder why he still has credibility with anyone. Oh, well.
Yeah, that's him. So maybe this prediction is a really good thing. If it's half as accurate as his collapse of the internet prediction then maybe it means that Linux will be the dominant OS within a few years.
If you accept faster than light travel and instantaneous holographic communications accross vast distances, surely you can accept that quantum computing (or some unforseen technology) has made encryption obsolete.
Hmmm, I hadn't thought of that. It's a pretty good explanation of why they couldn't just transmit the data, but it doesn't explain why they had to keep the data in R2 rather than transferring it to a disk. They wouldn't have been pursued at all had they not been smuggling out droids. Maybe R2 was programmed to only release the plans when physically at the rebel base.
Brin mentions how it's odd that the queen doesn't just use a camera crew to verify what's going on down on Naboo for the skeptics. I watched "A New Hope" again the other day and there was something similar that came to mind. They went through an awful lot of trouble to transport R2D2 to the rebel base because he had the plans for the Death Star inside of him. My question is, why didn't they just fax or email the plans over? It would have saved an awful lot of trouble and would have been much safer. OK, so maybe they had yet to develop such advanced electronic communication in that corner of the galaxy, but couldn't they at least have had R2 burn the data to a CD (or disk) so that they'd only have to smuggle the CD out rather than the two droids?
It's funny that you called this your weakest point, but I actually believe it was your strongest. This model has never been tried before, and the logistics are going to take some time to iron out. It could fail simply because people are too afraid to make changes needed to make use of this new model.
I agree that this is the biggest problem with the model and there are a lot of complexities which I think have been overlooked. The first thing that popped into my mind when I saw this model was if you have multiple people offering bounties for the same project (which would be necessary unless there's one big contributor or somebody who would have done it anyway) they are likely to have different requirements on what the finished project should look like. This complicates the programmer's life a lot if he has five different bosses to satisfy none of which are providing significant income by themselves. The other related big problem is that project requirements almost always change mid stream. Even if you can get five different companies to agree on a spec beforehand, it will be a royal pain when the project heads off in five different directions mid stream.
Don't get me wrong, I'd like to see this sort of thing succeed. I hope that somebody can come up with good solutions to these issues so that we have yet another model to work under.
It looks like it's on the order of a few months. I found a page which explains the IPO process and it says that there is a "cool down" period between filing and the actual offering which is referred to as the "effective date". It also says that the typical cool down period used to be 20 days but now it is much longer. I searched the Redhat application for "effective date" but nothing really made sense - I guess this is something which will be set later.
Anybody have an idea of when Redhat will actually go public or how long IPO applications generally take to process? Are we talking on the order of days, weeks, or months here? I'd really hate to miss this.
I was under the impression that the Windows emulation in OS/2 was pretty good. If IBM really wanted to hurt Microsoft wouldn't they port that to Linux or at least open source it and let the Wine folks do it? In my mind that's the single biggest thing they could do to speed up the obsoletion of Windows. So, I would question then whether they are driven to hurt Microsoft or whether that is just a nice fringe benefit of their actions.
Then again, maybe they can't port their emulator because of legal restrictions.
Hmmm... how does that make it not an exploit? It seems like it could be used as a denial of service exploit at the very least. Also, crashing can be used to run specific code in some cases where there is a buffer overflow (although I don't know if that's applicable here). There was a bug found in IE awhile back that caused it to crash (I think it's archived at the l0pht somewhere) and the person who found the bug (dildog) was resourceful enough to turn it into a serious exploit by controlling the buffer overflow.
If you feel like writing essays about Microsoft and you need a place to post them I'd be happy to let you use my KMFMS site. I've been gathering links to news articles as references to why Microsoft is bad, and I think some essays on Microsoft's practices would compliment this list nicely. I've been wanting to write some myself for awhile but just working on the list of links has kept me busy.
I'm pretty sure that MIT's athena distribution provides a modified version of FTP which has kerberos support. This allows for secure authentication, but I'm not sure if the anything else is encrypted. If authentication is all that you need to be secure you might want to check it out. Kerberos can be a pain to get working, but once it is working it's really nice (i.e., you enter a password once and all your kerberos enabled programs never bug you for a password).
Ssh port forwarding would probably also work, but everybody else has already suggested that so I figured I'd throw out a different option.
Of course it's going to cost a little more in the short term, but in the long term increased competition will surely drive costs down. This is why Microsoft has been able to maintain its monopoly - because people give far more weight to short term costs than they should when long term costs are also critical. Long term costs will decrease if there are viable competitors to Windows because some of those competitors are bound to be more stable and elegant to code for thus actually saving programming time and development costs.
Then again, this did come from the always unbiased ZDNet so it must be true and I'm probably thinking ahead too much.
Yes, I agree with you that the reason fewer people have helped out with Mozilla is not because they dislike the idea of it being controlled by Netscape and that it has a lot more to do with the utility of the existing code. It is critical that developers can get some immediate results when they add something or change something. Aside from the peer recognition that open source development offers, being able to use what you build is a very important motivational factor. There have been several things making it very difficult for developers to use what they build so far:
As you mentioned, the code is monsterous.
It does not compile into a usable product. What motivation do developers have to add features or fix bugs when they won't be able to use there changes for some unknown and arbitrary amount of time?
The Windows version requires Visual C++ (? or some similar Microsoft product to build). When the code was initially released I downloaded it in hopes of adding some features that I had always wanted to see in a browser. At the time I was mainly using Windows for development (I was writing Java so it didn't matter), but I wasn't about to plunk down $300 for something that I'd only be using for what I considered recreational programming (ok, I might have plunked down $300 if it wouldn't have gone to Microsoft). Well, I'm running Linux full time now so I'll probably give it another shot sometime soon, but over at Mozilla.org they're awfully adamant about code working on all platforms (understandably) so I still don't know what to do about testing it in Windows.
Fortunately, I see the biggest problem going away very shortly. Mozilla seems to be becoming a product which may actually be usable for day to day use within the next month or two. Once it does, I hope to switch over if only to help find bugs. It's critical that it be usable for day to day use so that finding bugs can be a passive experience rather than a chore.
Is the upcoming release going to be predicated on the completion of Necko? The switch to Gecko caused a pretty big delay and hopefully the switch to Necko can be phased in when it's ready rather than pushing back the release again. Microsoft has unfortunately gained some user mindshare by releasing IE5 before Mozilla and it's important to stop the momentum before it's too late. I'd say tough it out with the current code for the upcoming release unless the switch to Necko would be quick and painless.
Met with Bill Gates at the LCS 35th reception...
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it was an interesting experience, considering how I expected him to be very impressive and very professional. I was quite surprised.
It sounds like he hasn't changed much, then. I just finished reading the very entertaining Hard Drive (which is a Gates biography published in 93) and it depicts him as almost always having an upolished appearance, to put it nicely, at public events. The implication was that he was always too busy to be bothered about trivial things such as appearance. Anyway, the book points towards the same conclusion that you've seem to have drawn which is that he's too driven for his own good and needs to slow down.
They would also have to do some heavy sanitation when it comes to security holes as they could no longer rely on security through obscurity to protect them. Not that security through obscurity has worked for them, but it would be infinitely easier to find holes if the source were out there - all it would probably take would be somebody with a copy of slint. This would leave current Windows users in the precarious position of seriously needing to upgrade as a lot of the holes that are there now were probably there before. In a perverted kind of way, that might make Microsoft happy as it will force a lot more users to upgrade than would have otherwise.
The most unrealistic part of the movie was the beginning where Neo was supposedly working for a software company as a programmer and he went to work wearing a suit and tie and got chewed out for being late. That's what gave away that the world was fake.
I'd like to see a Slashdot poll asking which of the 6 excuses Jamie listed for the lack of outside development was the most plausible. I'd have to vote for Excuse #2 since it takes the immediate gratification out of writing code if you can't use what you write.
While it's nice to see that they're predicting good growth for Linux, I think their numbers are skewed as a result. The fact that you can download Linux for free isn't going to effect the numbers much because most people will still prefer to have their software on a CD. I think what will effect the numbers far more is that when a commercial distribution is purchased it can easily and legally be used on an unlimitted numer of computers, so companies that buy Linux are going to buy one distribution per company (or division if they're big) rather than one distribution per processor. So I would expect Linux's impact on the OS market to be seen more in the shrinking market share of other OSes rather than in its own ballooning market share since the market is inherently smaller when you're not restricted to a per processor license. I'm curious as to whether their report takes this into account (although, I'm not curious enough to shell out the 1.5k for the report).
You wouldn't happen to know the copyright status of the image, would you? If the author doesn't want to deal with the legal hassles maybe he could GPL it so that places like copyleft could distribute it if they wanted to. I might be interested in distributing it myself.
Where's the benchmark?
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But I think it would be really interesting to see exactly how much slower it was. If it was 100 times slower it would still be a major embarassment to Microsoft. I thought this was the one of the main points of the bet - so that it would be published exactly how much slower it is and Ellison could revel in the wide margin even if it is below 100.
Where's the benchmark?
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So where's the benchmark of Microsoft coming close to Oracle's performance? Weren't they supposed to publish it to get the reward? Anybody have a URL or is a lack of publication why Ellison isn't forking over the cash? The article was kind of bare.
Although the death star reference may make it seem like Microsoft, I have yet to receive any trouble from them over kmfms.com. I've been unable to get into Segfault to try and figure out exactly what they could have said to miff MS off, but I doubt they would target parodies before going after places like yamoo or the excellent CPT's Microsoft Antitrust Page which are far more direct in their criticism.
Slashdot Mirror
Whoa! Check out what the Jar Jargonizer translate's "Microsoft" to. I typed kmfms. com into the url translator and was pretty surprised at what it spat out. Jar Jar is growing on me.
Yep, that's him. Check out http://computer.org/internet/v1n3/ea ts9702.htm
Yeah, that's him. So maybe this prediction is a really good thing. If it's half as accurate as his collapse of the internet prediction then maybe it means that Linux will be the dominant OS within a few years.
accept that quantum computing (or some unforseen technology) has made encryption obsolete.
Hmmm, I hadn't thought of that. It's a pretty good explanation of why they couldn't just transmit the data, but it doesn't explain why they had to keep the data in R2 rather than transferring it to a disk. They wouldn't have been pursued at all had they not been smuggling out droids. Maybe R2 was programmed to only release the plans when physically at the rebel base.
Brin mentions how it's odd that the queen doesn't just use a camera crew to verify what's going on down on Naboo for the skeptics. I watched "A New Hope" again the other day and there was something similar that came to mind. They went through an awful lot of trouble to transport R2D2 to the rebel base because he had the plans for the Death Star inside of him. My question is, why didn't they just fax or email the plans over? It would have saved an awful lot of trouble and would have been much safer. OK, so maybe they had yet to develop such advanced electronic communication in that corner of the galaxy, but couldn't they at least have had R2 burn the data to a CD (or disk) so that they'd only have to smuggle the CD out rather than the two droids?
I agree that this is the biggest problem with the model and there are a lot of complexities which I think have been overlooked. The first thing that popped into my mind when I saw this model was if you have multiple people offering bounties for the same project (which would be necessary unless there's one big contributor or somebody who would have done it anyway) they are likely to have different requirements on what the finished project should look like. This complicates the programmer's life a lot if he has five different bosses to satisfy none of which are providing significant income by themselves. The other related big problem is that project requirements almost always change mid stream. Even if you can get five different companies to agree on a spec beforehand, it will be a royal pain when the project heads off in five different directions mid stream.
Don't get me wrong, I'd like to see this sort of thing succeed. I hope that somebody can come up with good solutions to these issues so that we have yet another model to work under.
It looks like it's on the order of a few months. I found a page which explains the IPO process and it says that there is a "cool down" period between filing and the actual offering which is referred to as the "effective date". It also says that the typical cool down period used to be 20 days but now it is much longer. I searched the Redhat application for "effective date" but nothing really made sense - I guess this is something which will be set later.
Anybody have an idea of when Redhat will actually go public or how long IPO applications generally take to process? Are we talking on the order of days, weeks, or months here? I'd really hate to miss this.
I was under the impression that the Windows emulation in OS/2 was pretty good. If IBM really wanted to hurt Microsoft wouldn't they port that to Linux or at least open source it and let the Wine folks do it? In my mind that's the single biggest thing they could do to speed up the obsoletion of Windows. So, I would question then whether they are driven to hurt Microsoft or whether that is just a nice fringe benefit of their actions.
Then again, maybe they can't port their emulator because of legal restrictions.
Hmmm... how does that make it not an exploit? It seems like it could be used as a denial of service exploit at the very least. Also, crashing can be used to run specific code in some cases where there is a buffer overflow (although I don't know if that's applicable here). There was a bug found in IE awhile back that caused it to crash (I think it's archived at the l0pht somewhere) and the person who found the bug (dildog) was resourceful enough to turn it into a serious exploit by controlling the buffer overflow.
If you feel like writing essays about Microsoft and you need a place to post them I'd be happy to let you use my KMFMS site. I've been gathering links to news articles as references to why Microsoft is bad, and I think some essays on Microsoft's practices would compliment this list nicely. I've been wanting to write some myself for awhile but just working on the list of links has kept me busy.
I'm pretty sure that MIT's athena distribution provides a modified version of FTP which has kerberos support. This allows for secure authentication, but I'm not sure if the anything else is encrypted. If authentication is all that you need to be secure you might want to check it out. Kerberos can be a pain to get working, but once it is working it's really nice (i.e., you enter a password once and all your kerberos enabled programs never bug you for a password).
Ssh port forwarding would probably also work, but everybody else has already suggested that so I figured I'd throw out a different option.
Of course it's going to cost a little more in the short term, but in the long term increased competition will surely drive costs down. This is why Microsoft has been able to maintain its monopoly - because people give far more weight to short term costs than they should when long term costs are also critical. Long term costs will decrease if there are viable competitors to Windows because some of those competitors are bound to be more stable and elegant to code for thus actually saving programming time and development costs.
Then again, this did come from the always unbiased ZDNet so it must be true and I'm probably thinking ahead too much.
Fortunately, I see the biggest problem going away very shortly. Mozilla seems to be becoming a product which may actually be usable for day to day use within the next month or two. Once it does, I hope to switch over if only to help find bugs. It's critical that it be usable for day to day use so that finding bugs can be a passive experience rather than a chore.
Is the upcoming release going to be predicated on the completion of Necko? The switch to Gecko caused a pretty big delay and hopefully the switch to Necko can be phased in when it's ready rather than pushing back the release again. Microsoft has unfortunately gained some user mindshare by releasing IE5 before Mozilla and it's important to stop the momentum before it's too late. I'd say tough it out with the current code for the upcoming release unless the switch to Necko would be quick and painless.
It sounds like he hasn't changed much, then. I just finished reading the very entertaining Hard Drive (which is a Gates biography published in 93) and it depicts him as almost always having an upolished appearance, to put it nicely, at public events. The implication was that he was always too busy to be bothered about trivial things such as appearance. Anyway, the book points towards the same conclusion that you've seem to have drawn which is that he's too driven for his own good and needs to slow down.
Alternatively, I've always liked the slogan "Where do you want Microsoft to go today?"
They would also have to do some heavy sanitation when it comes to security holes as they could no longer rely on security through obscurity to protect them. Not that security through obscurity has worked for them, but it would be infinitely easier to find holes if the source were out there - all it would probably take would be somebody with a copy of slint. This would leave current Windows users in the precarious position of seriously needing to upgrade as a lot of the holes that are there now were probably there before. In a perverted kind of way, that might make Microsoft happy as it will force a lot more users to upgrade than would have otherwise.
The most unrealistic part of the movie was the beginning where Neo was supposedly working for a software company as a programmer and he went to work wearing a suit and tie and got chewed out for being late. That's what gave away that the world was fake.
I'd like to see a Slashdot poll asking which of the 6 excuses Jamie listed for the lack of outside development was the most plausible. I'd have to vote for Excuse #2 since it takes the immediate gratification out of writing code if you can't use what you write.
While it's nice to see that they're predicting good growth for Linux, I think their numbers are skewed as a result. The fact that you can download Linux for free isn't going to effect the numbers much because most people will still prefer to have their software on a CD. I think what will effect the numbers far more is that when a commercial distribution is purchased it can easily and legally be used on an unlimitted numer of computers, so companies that buy Linux are going to buy one distribution per company (or division if they're big) rather than one distribution per processor. So I would expect Linux's impact on the OS market to be seen more in the shrinking market share of other OSes rather than in its own ballooning market share since the market is inherently smaller when you're not restricted to a per processor license. I'm curious as to whether their report takes this into account (although, I'm not curious enough to shell out the 1.5k for the report).
You wouldn't happen to know the copyright status of the image, would you? If the author doesn't want to deal with the legal hassles maybe he could GPL it so that places like copyleft could distribute it if they wanted to. I might be interested in distributing it myself.
But I think it would be really interesting to see exactly how much slower it was. If it was 100 times slower it would still be a major embarassment to Microsoft. I thought this was the one of the main points of the bet - so that it would be published exactly how much slower it is and Ellison could revel in the wide margin even if it is below 100.
So where's the benchmark of Microsoft coming close to Oracle's performance? Weren't they supposed to publish it to get the reward? Anybody have a URL or is a lack of publication why Ellison isn't forking over the cash? The article was kind of bare.
Although the death star reference may make it seem like Microsoft, I have yet to receive any trouble from them over kmfms.com. I've been unable to get into Segfault to try and figure out exactly what they could have said to miff MS off, but I doubt they would target parodies before going after places like yamoo or the excellent CPT's Microsoft Antitrust Page which are far more direct in their criticism.