Well is there anything to stop this sort of technology (if as I am guessing they have something slightly useful there, though quite specific) from being used with broadband? I can't imagine they have broadband accounts at the moment, but in 5 years, when people are creating web pages to display in 2560x2048 made up 5M of svg's and oggs then suddenly this tech will be pulled back out of the closet to help out everyone who isn't on connections yielding 1M/s typically (as I understand it most people would expect to wait 25s or more for a 5M page on current "broadband". What's going to happen when 5% of home users are on fiberband and getting 10x what all the broadband users get? And finally, absolutely anything which reduces core bandwidth requirements is a good thing. Now all we need is someone to implement a free version of a similar system, have it use free servers (anonymous) which can collaborate in a grid/wide-cluster so any client connecting to the network will get the best possible performance for the least possible incursion on backbone. Perhaps the powers that be should just hack in a caching requirement to IP6 and try to force good bandwidth management from the bottom level.
I don't actually see any real innovation where you see it. If I am running a local proxy, it will do the content negotiation with the web-server which ensures I only get updated content. Where they seem to be making any savings is in creating connections. In their system your proxy has a connection to their server which doesn't close. They are also using the presumably faster connections of their servers to make the connections to the outside world to check if data is updated. I wonder how often the cache will check a page, and what sorts of pages it will cache? Would a/. behind that system have a 10th of the chance of getting fp? Someone should write a Free squid client which basically acts like this proxy, write it by making it a version of squid which makes all connections to the outside world through a non-closing compressed connection to a squid server. The only issue remaining is how to deal with negotiating the data in the local cache, do you ask the squid-server to remember what it sent to each client, or do you (my favourite) get it to send a header and the content of each file in turn in order of update to the client with the client able to abort either the current file or the stream at any time.
Now how long have Propel been at this? And do you all remember the Irish kid who won an award recently for writing an uber-browser along with a browser speed up feature "which destabilised past 6x so he left it at 5x". Could this be the sort of thing he did (we all suspected it was something like this), though I'm still not sure about what was destabilising the system.
Well here is Ireland, ISDN isn't expensive... compared to 56k! You can get a 64k ISDN account with an ISP for the same price as a modem account, and one ISP at least offers 128k accounts at the same price. The killer is that any system in Ireland based on ISDN or POTS is charged the same rate per call at about 1c per minute off-peak and 3c-5c peak. So you want to download KNOPPIX, that's about 15 assuming you get 64k/second, and I don't think your going to find any compression worth talking about with KNOPPIX. If only they could see their way clear to making my phoneline work with their ADSL I would happily pay them the 195/month they want for an unmetered 1024kb connection!
Who says the web is supposed to be not moving? Dracvl! I guess I won't have any animations then. Now I would say that 99% of animated images (vector or bitmap) on the web are unneccessary, but if I wanted to show someone how a device worked (say a lock) I would much rather be able to show them an animated image than simply individual images and text!
New features include the following which I would regard as very, very major!
PDF export and mailing
DocBook import/export
Improved Online Help
Autodetection of newly installed languages for spellchecker, thesaurus and hyphenator
Accessibility Support (including Windows)
Support for recovering slightly damaged OpenOffice.org files
Flash export of presentations/drawings
Now the list of refinements in the individual applications is quite minimal, and yes there is scope to improve them all, but 3 of the above are issues I have been dealing with recently (pdf, docbook and language files) and I'm over the moon to see them about to appear. As with all Free software, the only real reply to you is can you do the work or will you pay towards having the work done? If the answer to both of these is no, then you have to accept that it is work done by volunteers (at least to you they are volunteering their work even if someone is paying them for it) and that they will do what they want first and won't prioritise your desires. If you want your issues taken more seriously, put your money where you mouth is (or your coding skills). If you can't afford to pay for the work, be thankful you haven't already had to pay for all the work thats been done.
What advantage does X offer? Well it means that you could walk into work/home and have this connect onto your network, at which point you can run the programs from your handheld on your desktop, do your work and then take your work away with you to your home/work and continue. You could also pull up (small) X apps from servers on your network. I can imagine in a corporate environement being able to deploy your programs acroos the handhelds and desktops in one fell swoop would be a major plus. Imagine the alternative, write (at least) two programs and design OS level integration to ensure that all data is shifted around and updated as it should. X offers possibilities and integration that no? other system offers. Occassionally you can write these off and take any other solution you want but usually leaving it in place or choosing it as the obvious candidate will allow some people to do things you would never have thought of or bothered with.
Suppose you get a Mac Card instead of a Windows one? Or vice-versa! If people just want to be able to buy any piece of computer hardware and stick it into their machine then were all screwed! However if people want to be able to get a xxxx that works in their computer the differences are small. If people don't know how to do something on their computer, they'll find someone who does or they'll give up, it doesn't matter what OS or hardware they are using (I imagine the kids all program the Tivo's for the parents, just like VHS). Windows world is far from perfect and lots/most windows users wouldn't dream of installing software (except games which it seems nearly anyone will try to install) or hardware themselves, they'll call in their experts (son/friend/Dell/whoever).
I suspect we will see a return to the compuserve/aol style "internet" where you can pay to be connected (and tracked) on a controlled network (where MS will attempt to ensure that every e-store is inaccessible unless you are on their trusted network and hence they get a slice). The question will be if MS will manage to prevent anyone operating an e-store that can work with their clients off this network, or if the network stack etc. will prevent any form of security which isn't theirs (not trusted). Don't forget that IE only really started to take hold about 5 years ago (IE4 released 30 Sep 1997) and dominence was achieved a year or two later so they have been holding the cards for quite a short time. As soon as they get "everyone" over to XP or later you can expect to see a lot more muscle flexing unless some government(s) actually start to really curtail them.
You seem to get exactly what I was saying. The question is what TOTAL COST is there to the company to put in Pro-E. How much will it cost to develop and maintain the batch conversion process and how much do they make from the customer. If the customer is worth it then fine, but if the customer isn't worth it should you do it anyway? Costing is an extremely difficult thing to do, and even the cost of costing the options has to be taken into account when you have a difficult customer. In your case it sounds like you had a bunch of formats coming in, and therefore the development/licensing for putting together the system can reasonably be seen as an overhead of being in the business, but when it is a small minority of customers then it is a cost of those customers, and you have to decide how to charge it, as an overhead to all your customers or a cost to the particular customers. If the customer who causes the problems ends up viewing you as a penny pincher and leaving then they did not value your company as you do and therefore were probably going to cause trouble all over the place. Basically it's complicated and to try and simplify it down to "buy the software, you must be nice to your customers" is how companies go bankrupt (unless they have chosen a pricing model that allows them to do it).
Well I'm not too far away from the customers and do deal with them. At present it is a pretty moot issue as OO.o has opened everything fine (or good enough) for me... so far. My point is that if you receive mails from 10 customers a day with Word docs attached and 1 of them is using an incompatible version, you have to ask if it is worth the TOTAL COST of dealing with that customer Vs asking them if they can be nice to you and send it in a format you can read. It's all about the numbers. Would you go out and buy any piece of software required to deal with your clients? If customers want to send you Quicken, Autocad, 3DS Max, Lightwave, HP Printer files and WordStar do you go out and buy all these pieces of software (or software to deal with them) or do you strike a balance?
Nope, your supposed to make money from your clients. If a client costs you a lot more than most of your clients then you should probably drop them as you will be more profitable. Now if you want to make money from clients you have to be nice to them, but that does not mean you have to sacrifice your companies profitability to do so! If you are a crap company however and anything would cause your clients to walk out on you then yes you have to get down on your knees and open wide and pray that someone has made sure your charging enough to be able to do this cause if you increase your prices or stop brown-nosing their gone. A company which has to pander to troublesome clients is not a healthy company. Any client should regard any business relationship as just that, a relationship not a one way street where they must be worshipped and given anything they want.
Why? The attitude sounds harsh when expressed so simply, but if you tell you "client" that you can't read the file and that your company has decided not to purchase the software required to be able to do so as otherwise they would have to pass on the associated costs to their clients, so could they please send the file in a format you can read instead (even Word XP or earlier thanks to oo.o) or fax it, should the client really have a problem and if so is it worth keeping hte client (yes I really said that, lots of the time troublesome clients aren't worth keeping without changes if you actually can cost them completely)? Similarly with a coworker you can ask them if you can buy the software from their budget (in a company setting there should be company standards so this should be easy)!
Please help people here out and look at your Corel Draw 9 for Linux carefully and discover why it was probably pulled. If you check all the dlls (it is a wine based product) you will find at least one DLL that MS would be especially interested in. IANAL and I never spoke to any lawyers about this, nor did I see any paperwork but I do not believe that Corel weren't entitled to distribute the dll, hence lawsuits set to fly, Corel stock purchased by MS, god only knows what deals struck and all Corel Linux stuff gone! BTW I can't remember the dll but a grep for Microsoft is your friend! Now MS have pulled out and Corel have dropped the Linux baby completely (when WP for *nix was around for a long time).
As soon as I started to read the article, the phrase "used by federal experts and private-sector experts" jumped out at me! I immediately thought that this was another way for the US administration to use the indeterminate "war on terror" to fund private enterprise. I wonder who these experts will be, and I wonder why they feel the need to make the "private-sector" qualification as opposed to civilian! Is this really just a way for the US government to provide a secure network for US anti-virus and security companies to communicate in the event of a serious net attack and thus provide them with a competitive advantage in the market (as non-US companies will have to or already have built their own)?
Sounds to me like it would be far more useful for that TCPA chip? Might help us use it as a co-processor for encryption/decryption. It sounds to me from your description that we would need to have re-architectured motherboards to take advantage of your co-CPU for graphics etc. and that isn't going to happen unless MS take up the code or else Apple twist it to their systems (which of course aren't x86 so would SCOs code be any use).
What ACTUALLY happens:
Someday real soon now IBM respond to this, probably with comments from fellow "Enterprise" friends of Linux (Sun, SGI). SCO's value drops from $32 million (they already lost about $4 million today) down to their year low or lower putting them around $6 million or less. IBM buy them, take SCOs patent portfolio and hopefully drop the patents (agree not to enforce them or pay any more renewal fees), release all "partners" from any agreements with SCO, put all SCO code into the public domain (except for their code for the Caldera Linux distro), delist SCO from the stock market, sack the management and employ new ones, split the shares amongst the employees and set them on their merry way again as Caldera the Linux distributor.
Bottom line there is no way in hell that IBM is going to send any cheques to SCO to pay them off. The worth of SCO is far too low! To paraphrase from "The West Wing" episode which I just watched: "You have to throw an elbow once on prime time, just to show you can, then you'll never need to again". If IBM take SCO to the cleaners, no-one is going to fsck with them again (now if someone had a good case....).
If IBM did throw SCOs code into the PD, does anyone think you would find anyone using it?
Well, MS seems to be trying to get the chip cost down by courting ATI. I'm sure they will play ATI and NVidia off against each other and they will probably both be keen to be the chip behind the XBox. The way I see it MS could release the XBox2 as a minorly upgraded box but a new GPU as long as they ensured that developers were unable to use specific NVidia routines (i.e. all XBox games must be flat DirectX). Thing is MS is just not winning this battle at all and looks to me like a fish out of water so god only knows what they will do to try and get out of the mess they are in!
Ever since Sony used Linux for a development environment and then released the Linux kit for the PS2, I have fully expected that Sony is hoping to bring a full featured stable computer system to the PSN thanks to Linux. The question is when will they decide that it is ready? The way consoles evolve will make porting a Linux distro both tricky (unique hardware and secrecy) aswell as simple (one design/spec so once you got it, you got it). I just pray that sony slap more ram and standard USB2 (preferably for controllers aswell, who'd buy a PS controller for their PC/Mac) into the PS3 so that people really could have a general computer + DVD Player + Console in one box. It's all a question of time , stability and commitment. As I say I reckon the key is USB as that will allow Scanners, Printers, Hard Disks/Burners etc. etc. into the game for next to no cost. Added benefit for me, we'd start to see manufacturers releasing products as PS3+Linux compatible breaking another stranglehold of MS (how many scanner manufacturers would develop Linux drivers without the enticement of taking the PS3 market aswell).
More interesting for me was their investment in a Linux clustering company, I guess if they suceed they can write that company off or will have to convince SCO that one of it's natural synergies is to donate a licence to use the "infringing code" to said "partner"! As you simply put it though they are shafted by their own distribution of Linux under the GPL. If they succeed against IBM would they have to sue themselves? Could IBM walk into the courtroom and say that they bought copies of Caldera under the GPL to gain access to each and every feature (or simply got a copy from someone who received it GPL) or are IBM actually accussed of implementing the "forbidden features". Seriously I think that all of this nonsense that the FSF insists we don't call I.P. should be governed by the priciples of trademarks, defend it or lose it!
For a university, the only real concern I can imagine they should have is the cost of outgoing net connections so I would wonder what efforts they have undertaken to minimise bandwidth usage? Do they have any decent caching technology in place and if so how will bandwidth be accounted for? For example I get a new laptop and install debian over the network, forget for a moment the fact that I could probably have used an internal mirror and avoided the charging altogether. So am I charged for the 1Gb I downloaded or am I charged nothing because someone else had already primed the files into their cache? If I am the first person to install Slackware 9 am I charged with downloading 1Gb or is that 1Gb diveded by the number of people who subsequently pull it from the cache? It would be a sad state of affairs if it became the responsibility of the students to create the network required to minimse bandwidth use rather than the university themselves. I realise of course that gaming is certainly not going to be cached, but how about multicasting to save on streaming bandwidth? Also they don't appear to be going to any efforts to designate "legal" traffic which is integral to the functioning of the university/faculties/students from "leisure" traffic which is simply about quality of life. All in all I wonder if they aren't simply trying to make more money not save it.
Your point about a population crunch may or may not be valid and the reason I question it is that China is reputed to have created about 250 million people living outside of the official society, a black-population if you will (a la black market not whatever racist crap just popped into some trolls head). As long as they have that number of people outside of control a population crucnh is unlikely except for in the official figures. Personally I await the day these people arrive in Bejing together and ask the government if they would like to mow them all down with their tanks or reconsider where they are going with their nation. Also it is currently estimated that the population should peak in 2050 at 1.6 billion, and as for a population decline, who knows but China could well have a far longer run in the limelight than you forsee.
You are porbably addressing the exact arguments of the ccTLDs with your statement! What if a country does not wish to have a whois service? Your approach is that they must, the countries is that it is up to them to decide whether or not they want to implement it. Look at this page to see how EU laws regarding data protection made the Irish domain registry remove whois. If we have one world government to rule them all then perhaps we can start to allow ICANN (or their replacement) to govern all the TLDs but until then each ccTLD should be allowed to run intself under any rules it desires. If China/France/Namibia chooses to make their TLD incompatible with the rest of the world why not? DNS is not TCP/IP and as long as a network complies with TCP/IP standards then it is on the net regardless of whether or not they use a DNS system at all or even one which is compatible with the rest of the net. It is up to each hostmaster to determine how they want to progress and whose rules they wish to submit to for any dns resolution they may require.
Personally I think that ATI are doing an OK job with their Linux drivers. I have an ATI M9/Mobility 9000 and I have been using the Ati X drivers. They aren't perfect, in fact they dissappoint me but I have high expectations of the hardware. The problem is that you are not going to see those drivers integrated into the distro or XFree86 and as such you are always an the mercy of your own configuration attempts. I want the chip/card which has the best performance under free drivers (X 4.3 is coming soon to my card so I can see how all the Radeon work has gone) and afaik the ATI chipsets have far, far, far better support under XFree86 native drivers than the NVidia chips (which I believe are entirely unsupported for 3d). Now why do I care about free drivers? Well I want my laptop to have a long life, and also I don't want to be dependent on a manufacturer who is brown nosing MS to the gills to try and supply the chipsets for the XBox2 (and that's both ATI and NVidia). Could MS hand the contract to whichever company agrees to stop discolsing any information on their chips for X or other Free efforts AND require them to stop releasing commercial drivers aswell (or cripple them). The only thing the really p*sses me off is that the S3 texture compression is required for various games and this is not in XFree86 and unlikely to appear (is it possible or will we have to wait for the patent to expire or XFree86 to start developing this outside of US patent controlled countries)!
While it may be tough to develop a market where writing GPL software does not mean that the first version you sell is then copied to the world, the GPL in no way prevents you from selling your software! It simply states that if you do distribute GPL software (for cash or gratis) you must provide the receiver with the source code if they want it! I agree with you however that "winning is nothing, usability is everything."!
Well I have been able to watch DVDs no problem on my 8200 w/ATI M9 and 1600x1200 monitor (with 2 batteries though, one battery would probably do it but I wouldn't try if I was actually on the road wanting to watch a movie and get to the end). Haven't tried LOTR:FOTR Extended yet on batteries, but I think I'll have to give it a whirl just to see how far I can push it!
Slashdot Mirror
Well is there anything to stop this sort of technology (if as I am guessing they have something slightly useful there, though quite specific) from being used with broadband? I can't imagine they have broadband accounts at the moment, but in 5 years, when people are creating web pages to display in 2560x2048 made up 5M of svg's and oggs then suddenly this tech will be pulled back out of the closet to help out everyone who isn't on connections yielding 1M/s typically (as I understand it most people would expect to wait 25s or more for a 5M page on current "broadband". What's going to happen when 5% of home users are on fiberband and getting 10x what all the broadband users get? And finally, absolutely anything which reduces core bandwidth requirements is a good thing. Now all we need is someone to implement a free version of a similar system, have it use free servers (anonymous) which can collaborate in a grid/wide-cluster so any client connecting to the network will get the best possible performance for the least possible incursion on backbone. Perhaps the powers that be should just hack in a caching requirement to IP6 and try to force good bandwidth management from the bottom level.
I don't actually see any real innovation where you see it. If I am running a local proxy, it will do the content negotiation with the web-server which ensures I only get updated content. Where they seem to be making any savings is in creating connections. In their system your proxy has a connection to their server which doesn't close. They are also using the presumably faster connections of their servers to make the connections to the outside world to check if data is updated. I wonder how often the cache will check a page, and what sorts of pages it will cache? Would a /. behind that system have a 10th of the chance of getting fp? Someone should write a Free squid client which basically acts like this proxy, write it by making it a version of squid which makes all connections to the outside world through a non-closing compressed connection to a squid server. The only issue remaining is how to deal with negotiating the data in the local cache, do you ask the squid-server to remember what it sent to each client, or do you (my favourite) get it to send a header and the content of each file in turn in order of update to the client with the client able to abort either the current file or the stream at any time.
Now how long have Propel been at this? And do you all remember the Irish kid who won an award recently for writing an uber-browser along with a browser speed up feature "which destabilised past 6x so he left it at 5x". Could this be the sort of thing he did (we all suspected it was something like this), though I'm still not sure about what was destabilising the system.
Well here is Ireland, ISDN isn't expensive ... compared to 56k! You can get a 64k ISDN account with an ISP for the same price as a modem account, and one ISP at least offers 128k accounts at the same price. The killer is that any system in Ireland based on ISDN or POTS is charged the same rate per call at about 1c per minute off-peak and 3c-5c peak. So you want to download KNOPPIX, that's about 15 assuming you get 64k/second, and I don't think your going to find any compression worth talking about with KNOPPIX. If only they could see their way clear to making my phoneline work with their ADSL I would happily pay them the 195/month they want for an unmetered 1024kb connection!
Who says the web is supposed to be not moving? Dracvl! I guess I won't have any animations then. Now I would say that 99% of animated images (vector or bitmap) on the web are unneccessary, but if I wanted to show someone how a device worked (say a lock) I would much rather be able to show them an animated image than simply individual images and text!
- PDF export and mailing
- DocBook import/export
- Improved Online Help
- Autodetection of newly installed languages for spellchecker, thesaurus and hyphenator
- Accessibility Support (including Windows)
- Support for recovering slightly damaged OpenOffice.org files
- Flash export of presentations/drawings
Now the list of refinements in the individual applications is quite minimal, and yes there is scope to improve them all, but 3 of the above are issues I have been dealing with recently (pdf, docbook and language files) and I'm over the moon to see them about to appear. As with all Free software, the only real reply to you is can you do the work or will you pay towards having the work done? If the answer to both of these is no, then you have to accept that it is work done by volunteers (at least to you they are volunteering their work even if someone is paying them for it) and that they will do what they want first and won't prioritise your desires. If you want your issues taken more seriously, put your money where you mouth is (or your coding skills). If you can't afford to pay for the work, be thankful you haven't already had to pay for all the work thats been done.What advantage does X offer? Well it means that you could walk into work/home and have this connect onto your network, at which point you can run the programs from your handheld on your desktop, do your work and then take your work away with you to your home/work and continue. You could also pull up (small) X apps from servers on your network. I can imagine in a corporate environement being able to deploy your programs acroos the handhelds and desktops in one fell swoop would be a major plus. Imagine the alternative, write (at least) two programs and design OS level integration to ensure that all data is shifted around and updated as it should. X offers possibilities and integration that no? other system offers. Occassionally you can write these off and take any other solution you want but usually leaving it in place or choosing it as the obvious candidate will allow some people to do things you would never have thought of or bothered with.
Suppose you get a Mac Card instead of a Windows one? Or vice-versa! If people just want to be able to buy any piece of computer hardware and stick it into their machine then were all screwed! However if people want to be able to get a xxxx that works in their computer the differences are small. If people don't know how to do something on their computer, they'll find someone who does or they'll give up, it doesn't matter what OS or hardware they are using (I imagine the kids all program the Tivo's for the parents, just like VHS). Windows world is far from perfect and lots/most windows users wouldn't dream of installing software (except games which it seems nearly anyone will try to install) or hardware themselves, they'll call in their experts (son/friend/Dell/whoever).
I suspect we will see a return to the compuserve/aol style "internet" where you can pay to be connected (and tracked) on a controlled network (where MS will attempt to ensure that every e-store is inaccessible unless you are on their trusted network and hence they get a slice). The question will be if MS will manage to prevent anyone operating an e-store that can work with their clients off this network, or if the network stack etc. will prevent any form of security which isn't theirs (not trusted). Don't forget that IE only really started to take hold about 5 years ago (IE4 released 30 Sep 1997) and dominence was achieved a year or two later so they have been holding the cards for quite a short time. As soon as they get "everyone" over to XP or later you can expect to see a lot more muscle flexing unless some government(s) actually start to really curtail them.
You seem to get exactly what I was saying. The question is what TOTAL COST is there to the company to put in Pro-E. How much will it cost to develop and maintain the batch conversion process and how much do they make from the customer. If the customer is worth it then fine, but if the customer isn't worth it should you do it anyway? Costing is an extremely difficult thing to do, and even the cost of costing the options has to be taken into account when you have a difficult customer. In your case it sounds like you had a bunch of formats coming in, and therefore the development/licensing for putting together the system can reasonably be seen as an overhead of being in the business, but when it is a small minority of customers then it is a cost of those customers, and you have to decide how to charge it, as an overhead to all your customers or a cost to the particular customers. If the customer who causes the problems ends up viewing you as a penny pincher and leaving then they did not value your company as you do and therefore were probably going to cause trouble all over the place. Basically it's complicated and to try and simplify it down to "buy the software, you must be nice to your customers" is how companies go bankrupt (unless they have chosen a pricing model that allows them to do it).
Well I'm not too far away from the customers and do deal with them. At present it is a pretty moot issue as OO.o has opened everything fine (or good enough) for me ... so far. My point is that if you receive mails from 10 customers a day with Word docs attached and 1 of them is using an incompatible version, you have to ask if it is worth the TOTAL COST of dealing with that customer Vs asking them if they can be nice to you and send it in a format you can read. It's all about the numbers. Would you go out and buy any piece of software required to deal with your clients? If customers want to send you Quicken, Autocad, 3DS Max, Lightwave, HP Printer files and WordStar do you go out and buy all these pieces of software (or software to deal with them) or do you strike a balance?
Nope, your supposed to make money from your clients. If a client costs you a lot more than most of your clients then you should probably drop them as you will be more profitable. Now if you want to make money from clients you have to be nice to them, but that does not mean you have to sacrifice your companies profitability to do so! If you are a crap company however and anything would cause your clients to walk out on you then yes you have to get down on your knees and open wide and pray that someone has made sure your charging enough to be able to do this cause if you increase your prices or stop brown-nosing their gone. A company which has to pander to troublesome clients is not a healthy company. Any client should regard any business relationship as just that, a relationship not a one way street where they must be worshipped and given anything they want.
Why? The attitude sounds harsh when expressed so simply, but if you tell you "client" that you can't read the file and that your company has decided not to purchase the software required to be able to do so as otherwise they would have to pass on the associated costs to their clients, so could they please send the file in a format you can read instead (even Word XP or earlier thanks to oo.o) or fax it, should the client really have a problem and if so is it worth keeping hte client (yes I really said that, lots of the time troublesome clients aren't worth keeping without changes if you actually can cost them completely)? Similarly with a coworker you can ask them if you can buy the software from their budget (in a company setting there should be company standards so this should be easy)!
Please help people here out and look at your Corel Draw 9 for Linux carefully and discover why it was probably pulled. If you check all the dlls (it is a wine based product) you will find at least one DLL that MS would be especially interested in. IANAL and I never spoke to any lawyers about this, nor did I see any paperwork but I do not believe that Corel weren't entitled to distribute the dll, hence lawsuits set to fly, Corel stock purchased by MS, god only knows what deals struck and all Corel Linux stuff gone! BTW I can't remember the dll but a grep for Microsoft is your friend! Now MS have pulled out and Corel have dropped the Linux baby completely (when WP for *nix was around for a long time).
As soon as I started to read the article, the phrase "used by federal experts and private-sector experts" jumped out at me! I immediately thought that this was another way for the US administration to use the indeterminate "war on terror" to fund private enterprise. I wonder who these experts will be, and I wonder why they feel the need to make the "private-sector" qualification as opposed to civilian! Is this really just a way for the US government to provide a secure network for US anti-virus and security companies to communicate in the event of a serious net attack and thus provide them with a competitive advantage in the market (as non-US companies will have to or already have built their own)?
Sounds to me like it would be far more useful for that TCPA chip? Might help us use it as a co-processor for encryption/decryption. It sounds to me from your description that we would need to have re-architectured motherboards to take advantage of your co-CPU for graphics etc. and that isn't going to happen unless MS take up the code or else Apple twist it to their systems (which of course aren't x86 so would SCOs code be any use).
I don't think that exactly correct!
What ACTUALLY happens:
Someday real soon now IBM respond to this, probably with comments from fellow "Enterprise" friends of Linux (Sun, SGI). SCO's value drops from $32 million (they already lost about $4 million today) down to their year low or lower putting them around $6 million or less. IBM buy them, take SCOs patent portfolio and hopefully drop the patents (agree not to enforce them or pay any more renewal fees), release all "partners" from any agreements with SCO, put all SCO code into the public domain (except for their code for the Caldera Linux distro), delist SCO from the stock market, sack the management and employ new ones, split the shares amongst the employees and set them on their merry way again as Caldera the Linux distributor.
Bottom line there is no way in hell that IBM is going to send any cheques to SCO to pay them off. The worth of SCO is far too low! To paraphrase from "The West Wing" episode which I just watched: "You have to throw an elbow once on prime time, just to show you can, then you'll never need to again". If IBM take SCO to the cleaners, no-one is going to fsck with them again (now if someone had a good case ....).
If IBM did throw SCOs code into the PD, does anyone think you would find anyone using it?
Well, MS seems to be trying to get the chip cost down by courting ATI. I'm sure they will play ATI and NVidia off against each other and they will probably both be keen to be the chip behind the XBox. The way I see it MS could release the XBox2 as a minorly upgraded box but a new GPU as long as they ensured that developers were unable to use specific NVidia routines (i.e. all XBox games must be flat DirectX). Thing is MS is just not winning this battle at all and looks to me like a fish out of water so god only knows what they will do to try and get out of the mess they are in!
Ever since Sony used Linux for a development environment and then released the Linux kit for the PS2, I have fully expected that Sony is hoping to bring a full featured stable computer system to the PSN thanks to Linux. The question is when will they decide that it is ready? The way consoles evolve will make porting a Linux distro both tricky (unique hardware and secrecy) aswell as simple (one design/spec so once you got it, you got it). I just pray that sony slap more ram and standard USB2 (preferably for controllers aswell, who'd buy a PS controller for their PC/Mac) into the PS3 so that people really could have a general computer + DVD Player + Console in one box. It's all a question of time , stability and commitment. As I say I reckon the key is USB as that will allow Scanners, Printers, Hard Disks/Burners etc. etc. into the game for next to no cost. Added benefit for me, we'd start to see manufacturers releasing products as PS3+Linux compatible breaking another stranglehold of MS (how many scanner manufacturers would develop Linux drivers without the enticement of taking the PS3 market aswell).
More interesting for me was their investment in a Linux clustering company, I guess if they suceed they can write that company off or will have to convince SCO that one of it's natural synergies is to donate a licence to use the "infringing code" to said "partner"! As you simply put it though they are shafted by their own distribution of Linux under the GPL. If they succeed against IBM would they have to sue themselves? Could IBM walk into the courtroom and say that they bought copies of Caldera under the GPL to gain access to each and every feature (or simply got a copy from someone who received it GPL) or are IBM actually accussed of implementing the "forbidden features". Seriously I think that all of this nonsense that the FSF insists we don't call I.P. should be governed by the priciples of trademarks, defend it or lose it!
For a university, the only real concern I can imagine they should have is the cost of outgoing net connections so I would wonder what efforts they have undertaken to minimise bandwidth usage? Do they have any decent caching technology in place and if so how will bandwidth be accounted for? For example I get a new laptop and install debian over the network, forget for a moment the fact that I could probably have used an internal mirror and avoided the charging altogether. So am I charged for the 1Gb I downloaded or am I charged nothing because someone else had already primed the files into their cache? If I am the first person to install Slackware 9 am I charged with downloading 1Gb or is that 1Gb diveded by the number of people who subsequently pull it from the cache? It would be a sad state of affairs if it became the responsibility of the students to create the network required to minimse bandwidth use rather than the university themselves. I realise of course that gaming is certainly not going to be cached, but how about multicasting to save on streaming bandwidth? Also they don't appear to be going to any efforts to designate "legal" traffic which is integral to the functioning of the university/faculties/students from "leisure" traffic which is simply about quality of life. All in all I wonder if they aren't simply trying to make more money not save it.
Your point about a population crunch may or may not be valid and the reason I question it is that China is reputed to have created about 250 million people living outside of the official society, a black-population if you will (a la black market not whatever racist crap just popped into some trolls head). As long as they have that number of people outside of control a population crucnh is unlikely except for in the official figures. Personally I await the day these people arrive in Bejing together and ask the government if they would like to mow them all down with their tanks or reconsider where they are going with their nation. Also it is currently estimated that the population should peak in 2050 at 1.6 billion, and as for a population decline, who knows but China could well have a far longer run in the limelight than you forsee.
You are porbably addressing the exact arguments of the ccTLDs with your statement! What if a country does not wish to have a whois service? Your approach is that they must, the countries is that it is up to them to decide whether or not they want to implement it. Look at this page to see how EU laws regarding data protection made the Irish domain registry remove whois. If we have one world government to rule them all then perhaps we can start to allow ICANN (or their replacement) to govern all the TLDs but until then each ccTLD should be allowed to run intself under any rules it desires. If China/France/Namibia chooses to make their TLD incompatible with the rest of the world why not? DNS is not TCP/IP and as long as a network complies with TCP/IP standards then it is on the net regardless of whether or not they use a DNS system at all or even one which is compatible with the rest of the net. It is up to each hostmaster to determine how they want to progress and whose rules they wish to submit to for any dns resolution they may require.
Personally I think that ATI are doing an OK job with their Linux drivers. I have an ATI M9/Mobility 9000 and I have been using the Ati X drivers. They aren't perfect, in fact they dissappoint me but I have high expectations of the hardware. The problem is that you are not going to see those drivers integrated into the distro or XFree86 and as such you are always an the mercy of your own configuration attempts. I want the chip/card which has the best performance under free drivers (X 4.3 is coming soon to my card so I can see how all the Radeon work has gone) and afaik the ATI chipsets have far, far, far better support under XFree86 native drivers than the NVidia chips (which I believe are entirely unsupported for 3d). Now why do I care about free drivers? Well I want my laptop to have a long life, and also I don't want to be dependent on a manufacturer who is brown nosing MS to the gills to try and supply the chipsets for the XBox2 (and that's both ATI and NVidia). Could MS hand the contract to whichever company agrees to stop discolsing any information on their chips for X or other Free efforts AND require them to stop releasing commercial drivers aswell (or cripple them). The only thing the really p*sses me off is that the S3 texture compression is required for various games and this is not in XFree86 and unlikely to appear (is it possible or will we have to wait for the patent to expire or XFree86 to start developing this outside of US patent controlled countries)!
While it may be tough to develop a market where writing GPL software does not mean that the first version you sell is then copied to the world, the GPL in no way prevents you from selling your software! It simply states that if you do distribute GPL software (for cash or gratis) you must provide the receiver with the source code if they want it! I agree with you however that "winning is nothing, usability is everything."!
Well I have been able to watch DVDs no problem on my 8200 w/ATI M9 and 1600x1200 monitor (with 2 batteries though, one battery would probably do it but I wouldn't try if I was actually on the road wanting to watch a movie and get to the end). Haven't tried LOTR:FOTR Extended yet on batteries, but I think I'll have to give it a whirl just to see how far I can push it!