These are pretty cool, just because of the "holy shit that's a little phone + PDA in one" factor. But, really, the market for these is limited, and shrinking fast.
These were the Next Big Thing during the www.dot.com boom, when everyone wanted as many things clipped to their belts as possible. Nowadays, a more sobering economic client has made all those technophiles look more than a little bit...goofy.
Yes, phones are useful. And it's nice to be able to store a phone number or ten. But 16MB of memory and a web browser? Video, for heaven's sake? No one needs this. Hell, no one even wants this.
All anyone is looking for in a cell phone is small size, good battery life, a strong signal, capacity for storing maybe 20 numbers, and mp3 playing. The rest is just nerd candy, stupid features that basically no one will pay for. These companies need to hone their market research skills, or they will go the way of the Amiga.
Now, when I first read this, I was a psyched as the next slashbot. Hey, I use Linux at home as a desktop OS, at work as a high-throughput workstation OS, and also at work as a low-downtime server OS. It's the closest thing to the "perfect solution" to yet come out of the software industry.
So what could be wrong with its adoption by the German government?
Basically, the problem is the German government itself. While it is ancient history to most Americans, the two World Wars (I and II) still loom menacingly in the minds of many Europeans.
Likewise, the hard line taken by GNU, the FSF, and people like RMS and ESR, has reminded more than one person of the fascism practiced half a century ago in Germany. Indeed, it's taken all of RedHat's marketing skills to overcome this image in selling Linux to corporate customers.
I just think that at this point, we don't want to be seen as "cutting deals" with those that might conceivably tarnish Linux's already questionable image. The general public already associates Linux with hackers and pirates; let's try to leave Nazis out of it.
That said, there are plenty of other places that we should be trying to woo with OSS. "Good guys" like France, England, and even Canada, could be great for Linux's reputation in the global community.
For all the evil that Micro$oft represents, one thing must be acknowledged: they understand the importance of public perception. I'd hate for Linux to underestimate this, and go the way of BeOS and OS/2.
Hey, this sounds like a great place for Linux! Cheap hardware has always been Linux's forte. After paying pennies for low end hardware, people tend not to want to shell out for Windows. Linux is the perfect solution.
This flood of cheap hardware will create a proportional boost in Linux market share. The low end, and computers that would otherwise be headed for the trash heap, is the one segment of the consumer market that Linux still dominates.
It's only a matter of time before Tux is in every household!
A website about a website about faxing your representatives...and now this is a message on a website about websites, in a story about a website about a website about faxing your representatives. Whew. So I guess this is what they mean when they talk about "multimedia!"
If you post the name of the Usenet group of which you are writing, I think the whole Slashdot community would be glad to get behind you and help out however they can.
Well, I'm always in favor of reorganizing -- rallying the troops, as it were -- when things go amiss. But I can't help but think RedHat blew it this time.
The embedded world, unlike the desktop and server markets, operates on a nano time scale. Companies pop up and evaporate faster than you can blink your eyes. In this dog-eat-dog environment, a week's hesitation can cause a lifetime's poverty.
I think RedHat may have faltered, and I don't think their competitors will let them get away with it. If history is any indication of future events, it's time to kiss eCos goodbye.
Interesting. So this satellite has long since dropped off the face of the solar system. And then, one day, without warning...it's back?
Excuse me?
News flash: satellites don't fix themselves.
As Sherlock Holmes was fond of saying, "once you have ruled out the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be correct." Or something to that effect.
In any case, I see to possibilities as to what really happened:
the satellite was "replaced" by a foreign government, so as to appear to be the genuine OSCAR 7 while monitoring all of our transmissions, and
the satellite was "replaced" by...someone else.
Now I'm not one to start telling UFO stories, but I don't want to rule out the second possibility (see Holmes quotation above). At the very least, we should approach the purported OSCAR 7 very cautiously. And we might want to start preparing a welcoming committee, too...just in case.
I spent the better part of the first year running Linux trying to get an industry-standard IDE CD-RW drive working. Needless to say, it's still a far cry from "solid." Printing (to a normal HP LaserJet from Mandrake of all things!) took me an entire workday.
I agree that UnitedLinux is going to take care of a lot of the duplication in the Linux market. While I like XMMS as much as the next guy, I must say I'd prefer Gnome and xine to KDE and MPlayer, but the details can always be sorted out.
We are nearly at the point where we can hold a candle to Windows on the desktop. I hope we don't fuck it up like Be, OS/2, and the Mac did.
I agree, this one goes pretty high on the Slashdot Top 10 Best CEO Interviews. And that is one hallowed list, let me tell you.
I was pleased with this. He managed to spill the proverbial beans without letting the equally proverbial cat out of the bag. That is, we got some insight into the oft-overlooked (VA Software, I'm looking at you) business side of Linux, without Mr. Love giving away any proprietary trade secrets.
So, as a businessman who was hoping to get a leg up on the competition, I'm disappointed. But I can't expect one of the nation's top CEOs (in terms of Slashdot interviews) to just give me information for free, I suppose. After all, you get what you pay for, especially in the world of Linux.
When I first read this, I was horrified. IBM has been one of Linux's strongest supporters, and it shocked and saddened me that they would drop our community like yesterday's long johns.
But then I reconsidered. It occurred to me that a lot of the public excitement about Linux is based on its "outsider" image. We're not "suits," we're "hackers." We have fun. That image is what sold Linux in the first place.
It struck me that Linux's recent partnering with IBM, HP, and other Big Corporations may be interpretted as selling out by others (and the media). Maybe these deals are responsible for the recent decline in Linux's market share growth.
I know this seems discouraging, but maybe it's for the best. Linux gets back some of its lost credibility, and the community benefits. Maybe we should tell HP where to shove it as well?
In the end, we'll just have to wait and see. But I'm optimistic.
Hey, this sounds great, I must have missed that one as well. Stanislaw Lem fans might be interested to note that they're coming out with a movie based on Solaris, another book of his. It's being directed by the guy who did Erin Brockavitch though, so don't get too excited.
Those are the same people who would be freaked out by having a foot-operated parking brake instead of a hand brake. The LCD of users. Microsoft and Linux are quite right to be ignoring them in their UI designs.
Nothing makes me happier than a slashdot front page that is pure italics. It looks great in Linux, because there's none of that nasty blurry anti-aliasing to get in the way!
Seriously, though, this article is a load of hooey. "Fatigue?" Please. It is an inconvenience at most. Is anyone complaining because their new Toyota doesn't have to be cranked before driving? Yes, interfaces and feature sets change over time. If you don't want the change, don't upgrade.
UI designers are by and large working for you, not against you. They're the ones who gave us context menus, tabbed browsing, keyboard accelerators, and every other Good Thing (tm) to come out of Redmond. This whining will get you nowhere.
This "game" seems all too reminiscent of the kind of "edutainment" that the War on Drugs has been pumping out. If parents want their children to love liberty, then they should teach them about it when the children are old enough to understand. Trying to brainwash them with video games will work until they're 15, at which point they'll run away from home, become pot-addicted prostitutes, and join the Christian Coalition.
Uh, anyone who interprets that as a real troll is a moron. It was a (rather uninspired, I'll admit) parody of the classic "BSD is dying" troll. I was trying to point out that Dvorak is essentially trolling for Mac users with his article. The correct mod would be "+1 Funny" or nothing, if you don't have a sense of humor.
This tutorial is an excellent starting point for people who want to get into J2EE. J2EE has quickly become one of the hottest new technologies on the market, and for good reason.
Some background for n00bs: J2EE == Java 2 Enterprise Edition, Java's flagship Java product. Ironically, "Java 2" actually refers to Java >= 1.2, but we'll let that slide.;) In any case, the enterprise edition has proven the favorite environment for high-availability, low-latency business applications.
As for deployment platform, I have to say that Linux is the ideal Java platform. Both companies support open source, so the community has made sure the integration is tight and optimized for users that demand the performance of C++ with the ease of use of Python.
This tutorial would be of help to anyone trying to break into the software industry, and a boon especially to those interested in C# and.NET, which by all appearances will be to Java what Java was to Linux, minus X11 and plus COM.
Yet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered Apple community when recently Dvorak confirmed that Apple accounts for less than a fraction of 1 percent of all computers. Coming on the heels of the latest Netcraft survey which plainly states that Apple has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Apple is collapsing in complete disarray, as further exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict Apple's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Apple faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Apple because Apple is dying. Things are looking very bad for Apple. As many of us are already aware, Apple continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood. The eMac is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Fact: Apple is Dying
BTW, anyone notice that googling for "BSD is dying" brings up BSD is dying? Interesting.
John C. Dvorak has been saying this for like 15 years. He's a DOS fanatic through and through. I guess getting attention was just a side effect, anyway. Haha.
So if he ran Apple, he would do what? Concentrate on selling on OS that ran on discontinued computers? I guess he hasn't been watching Apple's annual reports lately.
It's good to see the US catching up with Europe regarding computer security. There was a time (between the World Wars) when the US led the pack in terms of national security and technology. Sadly, we've seen a lot of that slip away, as second-world countries like France and Canada have upstaged us.
I'm happy to see that we're at least catching up. Now we just have to make the switch from Windows to Linux throughout the government, and we'll be ahead again.
One note on rights...I am a little frightened about ISPs keeping tabs on my netwanderings. But they probably keep the records anyway, so as long as the spooks (meaning gov't, not black people) need a warrant to get to it, I'm cool with this.
I know everyone is going to say, "just make a robots.txt file and everything will be okay." Sadly, that is naive and incorrect. What makes you think that the people who send out 'bots looking for content (rather than create their own or use hyperlinks!) would honor such a noble convention?
This is like trying to solve music piracy by putting a "No Napster" sticker on the jewel box. Nice thought, but it's a dead-end.
It looks like Micron is being dragged over the coals for anti-competitive pricing (e.g., the $30 512MB DIMM sitting in my toaster^H^H^H^H^H^H^HAthlon box). Meanwhile, Rambus is getting, er, rammed for their hardball tactics!
Now, sketchy contracts aside, it must be said that Rambus indirectly did Linux fans a service by cooling off consumers on the higher-end Intel boards (since even the affordable ones had slow, overpriced Rambus memory). In contrast, Micron supplied reasonable-quality products at very affordable (almost too affordable!) prices. Classic case of "damned if you do, damned if you don't."
In any case, the recent boom in Linux in the enterprise has come primarily from its good performance on budget commodity hardware such as that produced by AMD. Why invest in a Sun box when you can do the job with 6 cheap Athlons and good central A/C? (haha...I love AMD, but damn those things run hot!)
In the long run, attacking these companies, even if just, is going to hurt the cheap server market where Linux has been making so much headway. I fear the effects.
I hadn't thought of it that way, but it is right. People basically stop being productive around 50 years old, to my knowledge. Furthermore, as you point out, the only people who miss them when they die are their family. At the age of 50, the elderly should be forced into retirement for 10 years, at which point they can be painlessly put to rest. Couples should be bound to whichever date comes first, so no one dies alone.
We should invest our money in scientists looking for better ways to accomplish this so that it remains as natural a process as possible. Once we have the human population problem under control, we can concentrate on the important things, like the Martian Colony.
I still don't think space fountains are helpful, though.
Slashdot Mirror
These are pretty cool, just because of the "holy shit that's a little phone + PDA in one" factor. But, really, the market for these is limited, and shrinking fast.
These were the Next Big Thing during the www.dot.com boom, when everyone wanted as many things clipped to their belts as possible. Nowadays, a more sobering economic client has made all those technophiles look more than a little bit...goofy.
Yes, phones are useful. And it's nice to be able to store a phone number or ten. But 16MB of memory and a web browser? Video, for heaven's sake? No one needs this. Hell, no one even wants this.
All anyone is looking for in a cell phone is small size, good battery life, a strong signal, capacity for storing maybe 20 numbers, and mp3 playing. The rest is just nerd candy, stupid features that basically no one will pay for. These companies need to hone their market research skills, or they will go the way of the Amiga.
Now, when I first read this, I was a psyched as the next slashbot. Hey, I use Linux at home as a desktop OS, at work as a high-throughput workstation OS, and also at work as a low-downtime server OS. It's the closest thing to the "perfect solution" to yet come out of the software industry.
So what could be wrong with its adoption by the German government?
Basically, the problem is the German government itself. While it is ancient history to most Americans, the two World Wars (I and II) still loom menacingly in the minds of many Europeans.
Likewise, the hard line taken by GNU, the FSF, and people like RMS and ESR, has reminded more than one person of the fascism practiced half a century ago in Germany. Indeed, it's taken all of RedHat's marketing skills to overcome this image in selling Linux to corporate customers.
I just think that at this point, we don't want to be seen as "cutting deals" with those that might conceivably tarnish Linux's already questionable image. The general public already associates Linux with hackers and pirates; let's try to leave Nazis out of it.
That said, there are plenty of other places that we should be trying to woo with OSS. "Good guys" like France, England, and even Canada, could be great for Linux's reputation in the global community.
For all the evil that Micro$oft represents, one thing must be acknowledged: they understand the importance of public perception. I'd hate for Linux to underestimate this, and go the way of BeOS and OS/2.
Hey, this sounds like a great place for Linux! Cheap hardware has always been Linux's forte. After paying pennies for low end hardware, people tend not to want to shell out for Windows. Linux is the perfect solution.
This flood of cheap hardware will create a proportional boost in Linux market share. The low end, and computers that would otherwise be headed for the trash heap, is the one segment of the consumer market that Linux still dominates.
It's only a matter of time before Tux is in every household!
A website about a website about faxing your representatives...and now this is a message on a website about websites, in a story about a website about a website about faxing your representatives. Whew. So I guess this is what they mean when they talk about "multimedia!"
If you post the name of the Usenet group of which you are writing, I think the whole Slashdot community would be glad to get behind you and help out however they can.
Well, I'm always in favor of reorganizing -- rallying the troops, as it were -- when things go amiss. But I can't help but think RedHat blew it this time.
The embedded world, unlike the desktop and server markets, operates on a nano time scale. Companies pop up and evaporate faster than you can blink your eyes. In this dog-eat-dog environment, a week's hesitation can cause a lifetime's poverty.
I think RedHat may have faltered, and I don't think their competitors will let them get away with it. If history is any indication of future events, it's time to kiss eCos goodbye.
Excuse me?
News flash: satellites don't fix themselves.
As Sherlock Holmes was fond of saying, "once you have ruled out the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be correct." Or something to that effect.
In any case, I see to possibilities as to what really happened:
- the satellite was "replaced" by a foreign government, so as to appear to be the genuine OSCAR 7 while monitoring all of our transmissions, and
- the satellite was "replaced" by...someone else.
Now I'm not one to start telling UFO stories, but I don't want to rule out the second possibility (see Holmes quotation above). At the very least, we should approach the purported OSCAR 7 very cautiously. And we might want to start preparing a welcoming committee, too...just in case.Amen to that, brother! MiB units...LOL!
I spent the better part of the first year running Linux trying to get an industry-standard IDE CD-RW drive working. Needless to say, it's still a far cry from "solid." Printing (to a normal HP LaserJet from Mandrake of all things!) took me an entire workday.
I agree that UnitedLinux is going to take care of a lot of the duplication in the Linux market. While I like XMMS as much as the next guy, I must say I'd prefer Gnome and xine to KDE and MPlayer, but the details can always be sorted out.
We are nearly at the point where we can hold a candle to Windows on the desktop. I hope we don't fuck it up like Be, OS/2, and the Mac did.
I agree, this one goes pretty high on the Slashdot Top 10 Best CEO Interviews. And that is one hallowed list, let me tell you.
I was pleased with this. He managed to spill the proverbial beans without letting the equally proverbial cat out of the bag. That is, we got some insight into the oft-overlooked (VA Software, I'm looking at you) business side of Linux, without Mr. Love giving away any proprietary trade secrets.
So, as a businessman who was hoping to get a leg up on the competition, I'm disappointed. But I can't expect one of the nation's top CEOs (in terms of Slashdot interviews) to just give me information for free, I suppose. After all, you get what you pay for, especially in the world of Linux.
Keep up the good work!
This is the technology that CD users have been clamoring for since the invention of the disc.
As soon as there are Linux drivers for this, I'm going to burn me some Debian CD's featuring Tux!
Microsoft: prepare to be Tuxified!
Why the fuck are you ssh'ing and ls'ing /usr/bin? Got to make sure no one stole your grep or something?
When I first read this, I was horrified. IBM has been one of Linux's strongest supporters, and it shocked and saddened me that they would drop our community like yesterday's long johns.
But then I reconsidered. It occurred to me that a lot of the public excitement about Linux is based on its "outsider" image. We're not "suits," we're "hackers." We have fun. That image is what sold Linux in the first place.
It struck me that Linux's recent partnering with IBM, HP, and other Big Corporations may be interpretted as selling out by others (and the media). Maybe these deals are responsible for the recent decline in Linux's market share growth.
I know this seems discouraging, but maybe it's for the best. Linux gets back some of its lost credibility, and the community benefits. Maybe we should tell HP where to shove it as well?
In the end, we'll just have to wait and see. But I'm optimistic.
Hey, this sounds great, I must have missed that one as well. Stanislaw Lem fans might be interested to note that they're coming out with a movie based on Solaris, another book of his. It's being directed by the guy who did Erin Brockavitch though, so don't get too excited.
Those are the same people who would be freaked out by having a foot-operated parking brake instead of a hand brake. The LCD of users. Microsoft and Linux are quite right to be ignoring them in their UI designs.
Nothing makes me happier than a slashdot front page that is pure italics. It looks great in Linux, because there's none of that nasty blurry anti-aliasing to get in the way!
Seriously, though, this article is a load of hooey. "Fatigue?" Please. It is an inconvenience at most. Is anyone complaining because their new Toyota doesn't have to be cranked before driving? Yes, interfaces and feature sets change over time. If you don't want the change, don't upgrade.
UI designers are by and large working for you, not against you. They're the ones who gave us context menus, tabbed browsing, keyboard accelerators, and every other Good Thing (tm) to come out of Redmond. This whining will get you nowhere.
This "game" seems all too reminiscent of the kind of "edutainment" that the War on Drugs has been pumping out. If parents want their children to love liberty, then they should teach them about it when the children are old enough to understand. Trying to brainwash them with video games will work until they're 15, at which point they'll run away from home, become pot-addicted prostitutes, and join the Christian Coalition.
Uh, anyone who interprets that as a real troll is a moron. It was a (rather uninspired, I'll admit) parody of the classic "BSD is dying" troll. I was trying to point out that Dvorak is essentially trolling for Mac users with his article. The correct mod would be "+1 Funny" or nothing, if you don't have a sense of humor.
This tutorial is an excellent starting point for people who want to get into J2EE. J2EE has quickly become one of the hottest new technologies on the market, and for good reason.
;) In any case, the enterprise edition has proven the favorite environment for high-availability, low-latency business applications.
.NET, which by all appearances will be to Java what Java was to Linux, minus X11 and plus COM.
Some background for n00bs: J2EE == Java 2 Enterprise Edition, Java's flagship Java product. Ironically, "Java 2" actually refers to Java >= 1.2, but we'll let that slide.
As for deployment platform, I have to say that Linux is the ideal Java platform. Both companies support open source, so the community has made sure the integration is tight and optimized for users that demand the performance of C++ with the ease of use of Python.
This tutorial would be of help to anyone trying to break into the software industry, and a boon especially to those interested in C# and
John C. Dvorak has now confirmed: Apple is dying
Yet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered Apple community when recently Dvorak confirmed that Apple accounts for less than a fraction of 1 percent of all computers. Coming on the heels of the latest Netcraft survey which plainly states that Apple has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Apple is collapsing in complete disarray, as further exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict Apple's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Apple faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Apple because Apple is dying. Things are looking very bad for Apple. As many of us are already aware, Apple continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood. The eMac is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Fact: Apple is Dying
BTW, anyone notice that googling for "BSD is dying" brings up BSD is dying? Interesting.
John C. Dvorak has been saying this for like 15 years. He's a DOS fanatic through and through. I guess getting attention was just a side effect, anyway. Haha.
So if he ran Apple, he would do what? Concentrate on selling on OS that ran on discontinued computers? I guess he hasn't been watching Apple's annual reports lately.
It's good to see the US catching up with Europe regarding computer security. There was a time (between the World Wars) when the US led the pack in terms of national security and technology. Sadly, we've seen a lot of that slip away, as second-world countries like France and Canada have upstaged us.
I'm happy to see that we're at least catching up. Now we just have to make the switch from Windows to Linux throughout the government, and we'll be ahead again.
One note on rights...I am a little frightened about ISPs keeping tabs on my netwanderings. But they probably keep the records anyway, so as long as the spooks (meaning gov't, not black people) need a warrant to get to it, I'm cool with this.
I know everyone is going to say, "just make a robots.txt file and everything will be okay." Sadly, that is naive and incorrect. What makes you think that the people who send out 'bots looking for content (rather than create their own or use hyperlinks!) would honor such a noble convention?
This is like trying to solve music piracy by putting a "No Napster" sticker on the jewel box. Nice thought, but it's a dead-end.
It looks like Micron is being dragged over the coals for anti-competitive pricing (e.g., the $30 512MB DIMM sitting in my toaster^H^H^H^H^H^H^HAthlon box). Meanwhile, Rambus is getting, er, rammed for their hardball tactics!
Now, sketchy contracts aside, it must be said that Rambus indirectly did Linux fans a service by cooling off consumers on the higher-end Intel boards (since even the affordable ones had slow, overpriced Rambus memory). In contrast, Micron supplied reasonable-quality products at very affordable (almost too affordable!) prices. Classic case of "damned if you do, damned if you don't."
In any case, the recent boom in Linux in the enterprise has come primarily from its good performance on budget commodity hardware such as that produced by AMD. Why invest in a Sun box when you can do the job with 6 cheap Athlons and good central A/C? (haha...I love AMD, but damn those things run hot!)
In the long run, attacking these companies, even if just, is going to hurt the cheap server market where Linux has been making so much headway. I fear the effects.
I hadn't thought of it that way, but it is right. People basically stop being productive around 50 years old, to my knowledge. Furthermore, as you point out, the only people who miss them when they die are their family. At the age of 50, the elderly should be forced into retirement for 10 years, at which point they can be painlessly put to rest. Couples should be bound to whichever date comes first, so no one dies alone.
We should invest our money in scientists looking for better ways to accomplish this so that it remains as natural a process as possible. Once we have the human population problem under control, we can concentrate on the important things, like the Martian Colony.
I still don't think space fountains are helpful, though.
That's 2^20 times denser! For those of you who aren't so fast, that's just over a million. Impressive!
Now why is that "dubious"?