At a repletech conference three years ago,I saw a guy from Lucent give a talk about this. At that point, they had built a system from off the shelf components that worked. They had acheived something like 40gb on a 5.25" platter. He was predicting that they would be to market in three or four years with a 150 gb system. His goal was 250gb plus on a 5.25" disk.
This was a real system. Based on the talk, my company at the time initiated some discussions with Lucent. My company was a Japanese giant that was into many kinds of data storage media. They took it seriously.
Creating more than one class of hardware would be a gift to any HD manufacturer that wants to "de-commoditize" the business. The temptation would simply be too great. One would do it, and then everyone. Everyone outside the scope of US law, anyway. Last time I checked, that was about 95% of the people in the world.
Yes, you could store every book you ever read (or could want to read), probably every movie you ever saw, every conversation you ever had, or Office 2010
I confess my dirty secret. I don't read the licenses before I install Linux software. I don't read them afterwards either. I have never read a software license. Ever.
Now, I know it is my duty to read the license. I know that I should be on the side of righteousness. But that brings me to my second dirty secret. I just don't care. That's right. I just don't fucking care. What I care about is "does it work?", "does it do what I want?", "does it look nice?".
I like GNOME because it's fun. I change windows managers about once a month. Because I can.
At work I use KDE. It works all the time, its efficient. Besides KDE2 betas are fun too. And it looks a lot better than it did.
So if "which is better?" is the question. "Yes" is the answer. Beyond that, it's all bullshit.
I tried one of these (a feedback mouse) two years ago. I used it for two minutes and have pined for one since. It may be crude, but then what parts of a computer interface are not primitive? Look at the damn keyboard.
Anyway, this mouse was terrific, you could feel when you were over buttons, window edges, etc.
The idea that you will be able to feel textures in content (like porn) is kind of silly, IMHO. However, the benifits of bumps and textures for common mouse tasks are overwhelming. Talk about productivity improvements.
Try the GIMP with this, you can never go back. Feel which objects have been selected, get a gentle blip when two edges line up. Now, that's better than porn, I'll tell ya!
I'm not going to slag Cowpland for screwing Debian. I'm going to slag him for being a meglomaniac fool that rose far, far beyond his own personal level of incompetence. Self indulgent, greedy, vain, short sighted and dense are some of the more charitable things one can say about his character as a CEO. Not to mention his choice in spouse.
Corel used to be a good company that made good products and satisfactory profits. That all ended some time ago. In the last five years, Cowpland turned the company into a laughingstock. They did manage occasionally to spit out some good software. That is probably when Cowpland is on vacation.
Lest we all forget, the strategic direction of Corel for the last few years has been dictated by whatever subject was getting the most press on CNet. I can only imagine that the board finally rose off their collective knees when Cowpland floated a plan to create a Linux-Word Perfect-Napster style convergence for downloading MP3s.
Fantastic business sense and industry experience? With those qualifications, Cowpland can now go on to claim his place in the Shareholder Value Destruction Derby. He will join John Akers, Bill Gates, Dr. Wang, Gil Amelio and John Scully on the starting line. Dr. Cowpland can go on to bigger and better things with the certain knowledge that during his watch, Corel never once missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity.
Case in point, DeCSS. Many outside the US feel the US courts are, to put it politely, far beyond their jursitiction. This is a trend that started under the Regan administration and it just gets sillier and sillier.
I think most Europeans would see the French courts as at least acting within their jurstiction here. There is no suggestion that they want Yahoo to change its behaviour in the US, just to comply with French laws in France. This is a lot less of an issue with me and a US court ordering a Norwegian in Norway to act in accordance with US law and the rulings of a US court. Especially when the proscribed actions are not only legal in Norway, but almost certainly legal in the US as well.
My company used to require information from users before they could download our free app. We dropped this requirement for two reasons, first, the users hated it, and second, the information we collected was crap. I looked at the database once and found what I expected, hundreds of William Jefferson Clinton, thousands of Bill Gates and quite a few Saddam Husseins, Jesus Christs and Vladimir Lenins.
The point being, if you try to compel people to give you information, that information becomes useless. The more you attempt to compel them, the more useless it gets. Sort of like a Hiesenberg's principle for info.
Some of these folks who want to set up huge databases from user info will find that the extra money generated won't pay for the boxes and bandwidth the infrastructure will require.
4. STATISTICS. GlobalSCAPE may keep statistics regarding your use of the SOFTWARE (e.g., IP address, directory listings, number of daily unique users, average sessions per user, average session time, certain system information, daily ad displays and ad click-through).
I like the part about certain system information and directory listings. Sounds like they can poke around the old hard drive for anything of interest.
That's right, the pain is real as of now. Remember what happened to IBM in the seventies when they were fighting their anti-trust battle? They developed a political commisar type system, only with lawyers. Most middle and upper managment had a lawyer with them in most meetings and reviewing most of their communications. Every decision, every initative, sometimes every memo, had to be vetted by the lawyers.
I have always believed this was the real reason IBM missed the boat on the personal computer. They were fatally distracted.
MS may not have learned from history. The signs of distraction are already apparent. Look at the disasterous PR blunders of the last six months. The kind of sanity and decisiveness needed to change the dynamic is not present in Redmond, or at least not visible.
Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer may not care what Judge Jackson thinks, and they may be 100% certain of a win on appeal, but they run a public company. They cannot run this company as if there is no court order. The board cannot allow it. The result will be a messy collision of Gates, Ballmer, the board, new products, unhappy employees, would be mediators and lots and lots of lawyers. Kinda feel warm all over just thinking about it.
Then it gets interesting. Like a classical tragedy, will the things that made Gates the most successful businessman of the age lead him to destroy that success? The man seems unable to compromise. The smart thing would be to acceed to the break-up and fight the conduct remedies, those are the real danger to Microsoft's way of life. At the moment, there seems no sentiment in Redmond to cut the losses. They are going to bet the company, quite literally, on the appeal.
Stay tuned folks, the next six months will be the most interesting part of the whole saga.
That's right, the pain is real as of now. Remeber what happened to IBM in the seventies when they were fighting their anti-trust battle? They developed a political commisar type system, only with lawyers. Most middle and upper managment had a lawyer with them in most meetings and reviewing most of their communications. Every decision, every initative, sometimes every memo, had to be vetted by the lawyers.
I have always believed that the incredible inefficiencey this engendered was the real reason IBM missed the boat on the personal computer. They were fataly distracted.
Now MS will not make the same mistake. That's ok, they will make new ones. The signs of distraction are already apparent. Look at the disasterous PR blunders of the last six months. This will get worse with the introduction of NGWS.
Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer may not care what Judge Jackson thinks, and they may be 100% certain of a win on appeal, but they run a public company. They cannot run this company as if there is no court order. The board cannot allow it. The resulting mess of a collision between Ballmer, Gates, the board, the fleeing employees and NGWS (and Win 2x or whatever) will be amusing for all of those long accustomed to loath MS.
Then it gets interesting. Like a classical tragedy, will the things that made Gates the most successful businessman of the age be the same things that will lead him to destroy that success? The man seems unable to comprimise. The smart thing would be to acceed to the break-up and fight the conduct remedies. MS and Bill Gates are unable to do that.
Stay tuned folks, the next six months will be the most interesting of the whole saga.
You are right that the destruction of Netscape was a pyrric victory. However, that was not the only issue at this trial. It became clear that Microsoft used monopoly power in a variety of illegal ways. They broke the law. Not only that, but they did it on a continuous basis as a matter of policy. I have no attachment to Netscape and no axe to grind with capitalism. But I do like the rule of law and I want to see it applied in this case. Microsoft broke the law, they deserve to be punished. Whether the destruction of Netscape was profitable for them or not is irrelevant. Does a car thief get less jail time because he did not make a good profit on re-selling the car?
I used to think that LinuxOne was a bunch of people out for a fast buck. Now I think it is a fraud. The Linux community has a duty to expose this fraud. At least some of you must be US Citizens:). Why don't you do your civic duty and complain to the SEC, detailing some of the shenanegans LinuxOne has been up to. Like a non-existent product for download, and the share transfer. I believe that once they have filed for an IPO, these type of things become securities fraud and punishable.
And please leave MBAs out of it. I am an MBA, and an employee of a startup (not a Linux startup). Hard as it may be to believe, some MBAs are capable of running Linux. Some even like it because it is a great operating system rather than because it is a potential gravy train.
And another thing, I know a lot of MBAs and none of them are stupid enough to try the kind of things LinuxOne is up to. Puhleeez. This is a scheme cooked up by amateurs, not professionals with graduate degrees in business (or obviously Computer Science either).
I can't remember who said it, but there is a saying, "never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence"
I think AOL is going down the MS path, they are so big and feature packed, and such a hold over their market, that they simply CAN'T make good software anymore.
Also, they suffer from the same MS desease of not even considering anyone would use anything else. So they do not take breaking other software into account.
I was suprised that Corel opted for Debian as the base for their distro. I have ever only used Red Hat and derivatives (Mandrake 6.1 right now and its great). I would very much like to hear from the Debian crowd about why they like Debian better and what it means to Debian that Corel and others are using it as a base for distros targeted at the new Linux user. I really like the fact that there are many distros out there, but it seems RH and Debian are pulling away in terms of popularity. Any comments?
Some have already mentioned Copernicus, but it is not clear just why he is one of the more important people who could go on the list. As others have noted, there are very few people from the first half of the millenium. This is because not much new or interesting was thought of between the decline of classical civilization and the rennaisance. Copernicus was the first to really push western thinking back up to the plane acheived by Greek Scholars two thousand years before. It could be argued that his insight into the structure of the universe in general and the solar system in particular were an essential precondition to the acheivement of a Western Technological Civilization. Why? Because a system of thought that cannot accurately explain the most obvious and observable phenomena of the natural world cannot achieve much in the way of technological innovation. Copernicus got the ball rolling. Think of the insight and courage neccessary to go against the entire world order of the time. Few of us, even some of the people rightly nominated for this list, can claim both of these attributes.
Well, the bubble gets the biggest just before it bursts. Not to put too fine a point on it, the people willing to put $25 million into this are the same kind of people that are throwing money at any company that can put "Linux" in a press release. Let's enjoy it while it lasts.
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At a repletech conference three years ago,I saw a guy from Lucent give a talk about this. At that point, they had built a system from off the shelf components that worked. They had acheived something like 40gb on a 5.25" platter. He was predicting that they would be to market in three or four years with a 150 gb system. His goal was 250gb plus on a 5.25" disk.
This was a real system. Based on the talk, my company at the time initiated some discussions with Lucent. My company was a Japanese giant that was into many kinds of data storage media. They took it seriously.
Creating more than one class of hardware would be a gift to any HD manufacturer that wants to "de-commoditize" the business. The temptation would simply be too great. One would do it, and then everyone. Everyone outside the scope of US law, anyway. Last time I checked, that was about 95% of the people in the world.
They can't do it because you can't see the CIA or the Mafia guy cause Fidel Castro and his bodyguards are in the way.
From what I understand of RMS' character, I would read this article as a ringing endorsement.
My guess is that he couldn't care less if GNOME or KDE is better or more popular, he just cares about the license issue.
Can we stop these stupid and wasteful flame wars now?
Yes, you could store every book you ever read (or could want to read), probably every movie you ever saw, every conversation you ever had, or Office 2010
I confess my dirty secret. I don't read the licenses before I install Linux software. I don't read them afterwards either. I have never read a software license. Ever.
Now, I know it is my duty to read the license. I know that I should be on the side of righteousness. But that brings me to my second dirty secret. I just don't care. That's right. I just don't fucking care. What I care about is "does it work?", "does it do what I want?", "does it look nice?".
I like GNOME because it's fun. I change windows managers about once a month. Because I can.
At work I use KDE. It works all the time, its efficient. Besides KDE2 betas are fun too. And it looks a lot better than it did.
So if "which is better?" is the question. "Yes" is the answer. Beyond that, it's all bullshit.
I tried one of these (a feedback mouse) two years ago. I used it for two minutes and have pined for one since. It may be crude, but then what parts of a computer interface are not primitive? Look at the damn keyboard.
Anyway, this mouse was terrific, you could feel when you were over buttons, window edges, etc.
The idea that you will be able to feel textures in content (like porn) is kind of silly, IMHO. However, the benifits of bumps and textures for common mouse tasks are overwhelming. Talk about productivity improvements.
Try the GIMP with this, you can never go back. Feel which objects have been selected, get a gentle blip when two edges line up. Now, that's better than porn, I'll tell ya!
I'm not going to slag Cowpland for screwing Debian. I'm going to slag him for being a meglomaniac fool that rose far, far beyond his own personal level of incompetence. Self indulgent, greedy, vain, short sighted and dense are some of the more charitable things one can say about his character as a CEO. Not to mention his choice in spouse.
Corel used to be a good company that made good products and satisfactory profits. That all ended some time ago. In the last five years, Cowpland turned the company into a laughingstock. They did manage occasionally to spit out some good software. That is probably when Cowpland is on vacation.
Lest we all forget, the strategic direction of Corel for the last few years has been dictated by whatever subject was getting the most press on CNet. I can only imagine that the board finally rose off their collective knees when Cowpland floated a plan to create a Linux-Word Perfect-Napster style convergence for downloading MP3s.
Fantastic business sense and industry experience? With those qualifications, Cowpland can now go on to claim his place in the Shareholder Value Destruction Derby. He will join John Akers, Bill Gates, Dr. Wang, Gil Amelio and John Scully on the starting line. Dr. Cowpland can go on to bigger and better things with the certain knowledge that during his watch, Corel never once missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity.
Case in point, DeCSS. Many outside the US feel the US courts are, to put it politely, far beyond their jursitiction. This is a trend that started under the Regan administration and it just gets sillier and sillier.
I think most Europeans would see the French courts as at least acting within their jurstiction here. There is no suggestion that they want Yahoo to change its behaviour in the US, just to comply with French laws in France. This is a lot less of an issue with me and a US court ordering a Norwegian in Norway to act in accordance with US law and the rulings of a US court. Especially when the proscribed actions are not only legal in Norway, but almost certainly legal in the US as well.
My company used to require information from users before they could download our free app. We dropped this requirement for two reasons, first, the users hated it, and second, the information we collected was crap. I looked at the database once and found what I expected, hundreds of William Jefferson Clinton, thousands of Bill Gates and quite a few Saddam Husseins, Jesus Christs and Vladimir Lenins.
The point being, if you try to compel people to give you information, that information becomes useless. The more you attempt to compel them, the more useless it gets. Sort of like a Hiesenberg's principle for info.
Some of these folks who want to set up huge databases from user info will find that the extra money generated won't pay for the boxes and bandwidth the infrastructure will require.
From the license in Cute MX:
4. STATISTICS. GlobalSCAPE may keep statistics regarding your use of the SOFTWARE (e.g., IP address, directory listings, number of daily unique users, average sessions per user, average session time, certain system information, daily ad displays and ad click-through).
I like the part about certain system information and directory listings. Sounds like they can poke around the old hard drive for anything of interest.
That's right, the pain is real as of now. Remember what happened to IBM in the seventies when they were fighting their anti-trust battle? They developed a political commisar type system, only with lawyers. Most middle and upper managment had a lawyer with them in most meetings and reviewing most of their communications. Every decision, every initative, sometimes every memo, had to be vetted by the lawyers.
I have always believed this was the real reason IBM missed the boat on the personal computer. They were fatally distracted.
MS may not have learned from history. The signs of distraction are already apparent. Look at the disasterous PR blunders of the last six months. The kind of sanity and decisiveness needed to change the dynamic is not present in Redmond, or at least not visible.
Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer may not care what Judge Jackson thinks, and they may be 100% certain of a win on appeal, but they run a public company. They cannot run this company as if there is no court order. The board cannot allow it. The result will be a messy collision of Gates, Ballmer, the board, new products, unhappy employees, would be mediators and lots and lots of lawyers. Kinda feel warm all over just thinking about it.
Then it gets interesting. Like a classical tragedy, will the things that made Gates the most successful businessman of the age lead him to destroy that success? The man seems unable to compromise. The smart thing would be to acceed to the break-up and fight the conduct remedies, those are the real danger to Microsoft's way of life. At the moment, there seems no sentiment in Redmond to cut the losses. They are going to bet the company, quite literally, on the appeal.
Stay tuned folks, the next six months will be the most interesting part of the whole saga.
That's right, the pain is real as of now. Remeber what happened to IBM in the seventies when they were fighting their anti-trust battle? They developed a political commisar type system, only with lawyers. Most middle and upper managment had a lawyer with them in most meetings and reviewing most of their communications. Every decision, every initative, sometimes every memo, had to be vetted by the lawyers.
I have always believed that the incredible inefficiencey this engendered was the real reason IBM missed the boat on the personal computer. They were fataly distracted.
Now MS will not make the same mistake. That's ok, they will make new ones. The signs of distraction are already apparent. Look at the disasterous PR blunders of the last six months. This will get worse with the introduction of NGWS.
Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer may not care what Judge Jackson thinks, and they may be 100% certain of a win on appeal, but they run a public company. They cannot run this company as if there is no court order. The board cannot allow it. The resulting mess of a collision between Ballmer, Gates, the board, the fleeing employees and NGWS (and Win 2x or whatever) will be amusing for all of those long accustomed to loath MS.
Then it gets interesting. Like a classical tragedy, will the things that made Gates the most successful businessman of the age be the same things that will lead him to destroy that success? The man seems unable to comprimise. The smart thing would be to acceed to the break-up and fight the conduct remedies. MS and Bill Gates are unable to do that.
Stay tuned folks, the next six months will be the most interesting of the whole saga.
Even better, he needs TWO designers to replace Paul Steed.
I stand corrected
38,000 miles of railway seemed a bit low to me for a country the size of India.
www.indianrailway.com/railway has the goods.
62,000 route kilometres, 1,007,000 track kilometres.
That's 38,750 miles and 629,375 miles respectively.
You are right that the destruction of Netscape was a pyrric victory. However, that was not the only issue at this trial. It became clear that Microsoft used monopoly power in a variety of illegal ways. They broke the law. Not only that, but they did it on a continuous basis as a matter of policy. I have no attachment to Netscape and no axe to grind with capitalism. But I do like the rule of law and I want to see it applied in this case. Microsoft broke the law, they deserve to be punished. Whether the destruction of Netscape was profitable for them or not is irrelevant. Does a car thief get less jail time because he did not make a good profit on re-selling the car?
Hey! You sank my battleship!
Man, the Chinese Government is acting like a bunch of fucking Communists!
I used to think that LinuxOne was a bunch of people out for a fast buck. Now I think it is a fraud. The Linux community has a duty to expose this fraud. At least some of you must be US Citizens :). Why don't you do your civic duty and complain to the SEC, detailing some of the shenanegans LinuxOne has been up to. Like a non-existent product for download, and the share transfer. I believe that once they have filed for an IPO, these type of things become securities fraud and punishable.
And please leave MBAs out of it. I am an MBA, and an employee of a startup (not a Linux startup). Hard as it may be to believe, some MBAs are capable of running Linux. Some even like it because it is a great operating system rather than because it is a potential gravy train.
And another thing, I know a lot of MBAs and none of them are stupid enough to try the kind of things LinuxOne is up to. Puhleeez. This is a scheme cooked up by amateurs, not professionals with graduate degrees in business (or obviously Computer Science either).
I can't remember who said it, but there is a saying,
"never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence"
I think AOL is going down the MS path, they are so big and feature packed, and such a hold over their market, that they simply CAN'T make good software anymore.
Also, they suffer from the same MS desease of not even considering anyone would use anything else. So they do not take breaking other software into account.
Lenin has left the building Stalin has arrived
I was suprised that Corel opted for Debian as the base for their distro. I have ever only used Red Hat and derivatives (Mandrake 6.1 right now and its great). I would very much like to hear from the Debian crowd about why they like Debian better and what it means to Debian that Corel and others are using it as a base for distros targeted at the new Linux user. I really like the fact that there are many distros out there, but it seems RH and Debian are pulling away in terms of popularity. Any comments?
Some have already mentioned Copernicus, but it is not clear just why he is one of the more important people who could go on the list. As others have noted, there are very few people from the first half of the millenium. This is because not much new or interesting was thought of between the decline of classical civilization and the rennaisance. Copernicus was the first to really push western thinking back up to the plane acheived by Greek Scholars two thousand years before. It could be argued that his insight into the structure of the universe in general and the solar system in particular were an essential precondition to the acheivement of a Western Technological Civilization. Why? Because a system of thought that cannot accurately explain the most obvious and observable phenomena of the natural world cannot achieve much in the way of technological innovation. Copernicus got the ball rolling. Think of the insight and courage neccessary to go against the entire world order of the time. Few of us, even some of the people rightly nominated for this list, can claim both of these attributes.
Well, the bubble gets the biggest just before it bursts. Not to put too fine a point on it, the people willing to put $25 million into this are the same kind of people that are throwing money at any company that can put "Linux" in a press release. Let's enjoy it while it lasts.