From the FCC Press Release: "FCC ADOPTS ORDER ADDRESSING DIAL-UP INTERNET TRAFFIC FCC Lets States Decide Whether Existing Interconnections..."
I personally don't understand the implications of this ruling at all. But, you can still lobby your state PUC memberst to make sure that no decision is made that would raise the cost of Internet access (and I'm not sure if this decision will).
However, if you live in a payola backwater (many state PUCs are just Bell front organizations), too bad for you.
Arguing that Windows 9x is just a "GUI" (as if it was KDE or something), is a little silly. Windows does all of the memory and device managment on a modern computer.
DOS is only used for bootstrapping and for legacy driver support under 9x. (Wait, that's all DOS was ever used for!) It should be given away.
It's been quite a few years since I've read anything that impunes that someone is a communist if they fit a certain behavior set. Especially WRT an OS - talk about stupid. Running Linux makes you a pinko commie faggot. Don't be that way!
(Although I personally don't really care about KDE licencing issues, I don't think MS, Apple, IBM, Be or anyone else would base their GUI on someone else's toolkit. Silly to imply that Linux should.)
Microsoft used to love Samba, they saw it as a way to transition people from unix to NT. Now that it's being used in reverse to move people from NT to Unix, they're not so happy.
As for MS changing the protocol, I doubt they have the balls. Too many big customers are using Samba, OS/2, various DOS clients, WfW, etc. They know SMB is essentially legacy, so their latest efforts revolve distributed file systems, Active-Directory based security, etc.
Actually, Warner ran Atari (and the entire videogame business) into the ground, and Tramiel just stepped on the pieces that were left.
Warner is responsible for various genius moves such as the 5200 (Atari 400 + slightly incompatible + no keyboard + shitty joysticks), massive ET marketing tie-ins. (There is some giant landfill full of ET The Extra Terrestial games out in the desert somewhere.), and flooding the market with a mass of overpriced rotten games - leading to the market crash of 1984.
The 400 & 800 computers predate Warner and are from the orginial Nolan Bushnell Atari.
"This is how you ruin Linux," said Kimball Brown, an analyst at Dataquest Inc., in San Jose, Calif. "I think what Intel is doing is right--investing in one version of Linux. The more you support all the versions, the more of a mess it becomes."
I have to say that this is the first time I've heard someone who wasn't a slashdot nazi advocate the One True Distribution theory. Somebody out there must be paying Dataquest for advice like this. Glad it's not me.
In other internet discussions (maybe do a dejanews on alt.folklore.computer), the general consensus was that there is two origins for Foo.
(1) Fucked Up, as mentioned by many above
(2) A very old word for 'devil' or 'enemy' - this is is the "foo fighters" usage.
Of course, the word made into programming jargon through the military. The interesting point was that it dates back to the very earliest computer usage (much like bug does).
The DoJ seems to be besides itself figuring out what to do if (when) they win the Anti-trust case. As far as I can tell, here's their options:
(A) They could lay down a bunch of marketing restrictions, but as you correctly said, MS has never paid any attention to consent degrees and fair marketing practices. That just leads to 20 more years of lawsuits arguing who did what when, etc.
(B) They could break up Microsoft into "OS" and "Application" groups. Harder than it might seem -- IIS (OS?) is intimately tied into IE (app). Likewise, Office 2000 (app) will have an "Office Server" (OS) tied into NT and IIS. Besides - a split-in-half Microsoft is two giant monopolies rather than one.
(C) They could force Microsoft to give the source code away. I'm sure all of you Unix hackers would love to go fix Win98. What would be more likely to happen would that the hardware vendors and third parties would patch it together to work with their stuff. Imagine an "IBM Windows" or "Compaq Windows" or "RedHat Windows with Gnome", all slightly incompatible. Er, wait, that's just like Linux. Bottom line is that current MS customers wouldn't be too happy with this option.
(D) The DoJ can wage a war of attrition. Microsoft is basically a big Ponzi scheme that can afford (through paper stock options) to make very smart people work real hard for them. If the stock starts dropping, so will the intelligent people that keep MS on top. Much like the IBM case, by the time it's all over, it might be a moot point.
(There is a very interesting article over on PC week talking about how the various mid-level millionares over at Microsoft are basically unmanagible, and this is one of the reasons for the lateness of Windows 2000.)
If anyone else has some interesting ideas on what the government should do to stop Microsoft, I'd like to read them. None of the above seems all that great to me.
Ya - Same goes for the military freaks and their Billion Dollar B-2 Bombers. Those of us that actually work for a living and have to pay taxes may never get to fly around in this great plane WE paid for, and that truly is a shame.
Well, if you'd look at those books, you'd discover that 90% of what's in there are the keys for your desktop wallpaper or screen saver or whatever. I'm sure if you published a book with every parameter used for the Linux kernal, KDE, WindowMaker, GNOME, Wine, X, sendmail, etc it would be 5 times as thick as those NT books.
Personally, I don't think the idea of a central configuation database is all that stupid. What's dumb is the structure that MS chose to implement, with application settings scattered to and fro in a manner such that not even the installers can keep track of it all. However, even in the mess that it's in, it's a lot more consistant than the myriad of unix config files with their widely differing structures.
Furthermore, the stated design of the Registry was that it was not supposed to be user-editable. Of course, there's a ton of useful settings in there that MS provided no dialog box for. For example, MS DNS (joke) virtually requires that you dig around in the reg. Furthermore, enforcing policies requires detailed knowledge of the reg.
(BTW, they are somewhat improving the sitation with a scripting interface that exists now in IIS and is system-wide in Win2K. I also should add that I've never seen an NT registry go corrupt like a 9x registry is certain to do.)
One thing I've noticed is that most Mac users do a pretty good job of supporting their own computers, including upgrading the OS and installing hardware.
This of course drives tech support people nuts -- Imagine a graphic artist doing the hidden mysteries that only they can do! The only logical conclusion is that the funky Apple computer is shit.
Of course this is due to the fact that the MacOS was designed from the ground up to be easy to support.
Those of you who believe that Linux+KDE/Gnome, with a little more work, can be as easy to adminster as Macs are kidding yourselves. Essentially that's what they tried to do with Windows, and failed. I don't have very much faith that the very qualified Linux programmers or even MacOS-X project can put a pretty face on the UNIX mess and expect it as supportable as the MacOS.
(Of course many Linux users don't want Linux to be easy, but that's not "world domination"!)
1) I wonder if this is really a concrete plan or if it is just being 'floated' to gauge user and IT reaction. Washington politicians do this sort of thing all the time.
2) Having a machine-based CPU ID seems to run counter to the MS-backed Smart Card initiative, which associates the unique ID to the user, not the computer. MS's "Intellimirror" app distribution system is based on user credentials rather than computers, for example.
3) Anyone who thinks they can re-introduce copy protection in general market software has really been smoking lots of crack. Copy protection only kinda-sorta worked in the early 80s, when the computer market was much much smaller. (Or for very low volume apps, like those on Sun.) Imagine if even 1% of Windows XX users had some sort of copy protection problem due to to a CPU UID problem. That would be enough support calls to drive MS out of business.
Hmmm, I thought that 30-some percent of the installed base still runs DOS or Windows 3.1. In the server market, there are still tons of Netware 3.x boxes out there.
Migration is a *slow* process, and it certainly might take 10 years for linux to displace WinNT for applicaiton servers. On the other hand, linux can sneak in *now* for apps that NT isn't good at or doesn't run (Oracle, proxying, firwall, DNS, etc).
Hmmm, MS announces that Win2K is going to be later than ever, ZDNet suddenly starts printing lots-o Linux articles.
No conspiricy -- just that outlets like ZD rely on NEW NEW NEW to sell their press, and right now Microsoft ain't delivering. So they go elsewhere.
Just like back when Windows 95 kept getting delayed and more delayed, and all of a sudden ZD started printing lots of OS/2 Warp articles. As soon as 95 came out, they dropped Warp press ASAP. I'd expect them to do the same with Linux as soon as Win2000 is out.
(BTW, there seems to be a divergence in opinion in Linux space. Slashdotters seem to think that the mainstream press sucks and they should go away. Others are writting them and compaining that their WordPerfect/Linux writeup was not as long as the MS Office one.)
Is this product being sold to "self respecting Linux gurus" or is it being sold to small businesses that can't afford computer nerds?
I would guess there's a huge market for the latter -- in alot of companies the "system admin" is also the receptionist just cuz they use MS Word the most. They don't care that it runs linux, they want Internet.
I find this report odd. In my experience a well designed Domino server can stay up for months without problems.
(I'll admin that the client was a unstable piece of crap between 4.0 and about 4.5.2. But it's rock solid now (4.63) Try the latest patches - you'll be happier.)
RPC calls should be implemented on the Network layer (3)? Name one system other than routers that does that!
Mail encryption in Notes is only enabled if the user or the server admin turns it on. It's a Feee-ture.
Save confilcts do happen, but they are usually the result of a poor database design. Notes is by no means a SQL replacement. If you've been using Notes for all these years, one might think you'd have more of a clue.
I'm fine with "1394", but I doubt Joe Consumer would be. The big thing that's going to prohibit consumer adoption is the confusion spread by ten different naming standards (and not the $1 toll).
Techie: "Just plug the iLink into the Firewire and then the Firewire into the DV-o-licious and that into the 1394. Plug and Play!!"
Seven some responses to this post, and not one person can get around to mentioning that FIPS (if you'd bother to look at the link) is a cryptographic standard, and that '"FIPS 140-1 is very important, but there aren't enough products to buy," says the Defense Department's Schaeffer'.
Instead we get a bunch of moronic posts discussing how Linux is a better web server and how NT Admins are point-and-click. And one guy who's so mad at Microsoft, that he sounds like he's about to cry.
My guess is that FIPS is some sort of artificial standard that will only be in certain very specialized applications. No, the federal government is not going to dump NT and install Linux on all of the Bureau of Agriculture's 486-50s! In fact, odds are that Linux will never be FIPS-certified, nor will anyone really even care.
Yeah, Mac users will certainly reject non-standard widgets. Look at MS Office 4.2, which was slammed for looking too much like Windows (although it didn't).
That is, except for the Mac users too busy hating Microsoft to load IE!
Customers purchasing *products*, not ISP services. On a closed system like AOL, one can understand how AOL can get a cut of purchases within their closed system. But on a publicly accessible system like MSN, it unlikely that MSN subscribers patronize MSN sites at any higher rate than non-MSN subscribers. Especially since the default config of MSIE dumps you into MSN through the home page and channel bar, no matter who your ISP is.
Back to the original point - buying MSN is like buying Netcom, minus the equipment and network.
I thought pretty much all of MSN's services are now availible to every web user, and MSN itself was now a standard PPP dial-in ISP. (No more funky client.) Furthermore, they've got no 'network' of their own, but lease bandwidth on UUnet.
If so, ATT is really not buying a online service, but just buying customers. Who cares.
Sony has plans to make Firewire a univeral interconnect for stereo systems. Just replace that ratsnest of RCA plugs and digital interconnects with one firewire chain. Sounds like a good idea to me.
(Agreed that a Firewire keyboard will probably not see the light of day, tho.)
Slashdot Mirror
From the FCC Press Release: "FCC ADOPTS ORDER ADDRESSING DIAL-UP INTERNET TRAFFIC FCC Lets States Decide Whether Existing Interconnections
I personally don't understand the implications of this ruling at all. But, you can still lobby your state PUC memberst to make sure that no decision is made that would raise the cost of Internet access (and I'm not sure if this decision will).
However, if you live in a payola backwater (many state PUCs are just Bell front organizations), too bad for you.
Arguing that Windows 9x is just a "GUI" (as if it was KDE or something), is a little silly. Windows does all of the memory and device managment on a modern computer.
DOS is only used for bootstrapping and for legacy driver support under 9x. (Wait, that's all DOS was ever used for!) It should be given away.
It's been quite a few years since I've read anything that impunes that someone is a communist if they fit a certain behavior set. Especially WRT an OS - talk about stupid. Running Linux makes you a pinko commie faggot. Don't be that way!
(Although I personally don't really care about KDE licencing issues, I don't think MS, Apple, IBM, Be or anyone else would base their GUI on someone else's toolkit. Silly to imply that Linux should.)
SMB dates back to the IBM/MS LanMan era.
Microsoft used to love Samba, they saw it as a way to transition people from unix to NT. Now that it's being used in reverse to move people from NT to Unix, they're not so happy.
As for MS changing the protocol, I doubt they have the balls. Too many big customers are using Samba, OS/2, various DOS clients, WfW, etc. They know SMB is essentially legacy, so their latest efforts revolve distributed file systems, Active-Directory based security, etc.
if NT systems are commonly used in POS systems? I would think not - they seem to be usually old SCO or Sun, or even IBM midrange stuff.
Actually, Warner ran Atari (and the entire videogame business) into the ground, and Tramiel just stepped on the pieces that were left.
Warner is responsible for various genius moves such as the 5200 (Atari 400 + slightly incompatible + no keyboard + shitty joysticks), massive ET marketing tie-ins. (There is some giant landfill full of ET The Extra Terrestial games out in the desert somewhere.), and flooding the market with a mass of overpriced rotten games - leading to the market crash of 1984.
The 400 & 800 computers predate Warner and are from the orginial Nolan Bushnell Atari.
"This is how you ruin Linux," said Kimball Brown, an analyst at Dataquest Inc., in San Jose, Calif. "I think what Intel is doing is right--investing in one version of Linux. The more you support all the versions, the more of a mess it becomes."
I have to say that this is the first time I've heard someone who wasn't a slashdot nazi advocate the One True Distribution theory. Somebody out there must be paying Dataquest for advice like this. Glad it's not me.
In other internet discussions (maybe do a dejanews on alt.folklore.computer), the general consensus was that there is two origins for Foo.
(1) Fucked Up, as mentioned by many above
(2) A very old word for 'devil' or 'enemy' - this is is the "foo fighters" usage.
Of course, the word made into programming jargon through the military. The interesting point was that it dates back to the very earliest computer usage (much like bug does).
The DoJ seems to be besides itself figuring out what to do if (when) they win the Anti-trust case. As far as I can tell, here's their options:
(A) They could lay down a bunch of marketing restrictions, but as you correctly said, MS has never paid any attention to consent degrees and fair marketing practices. That just leads to 20 more years of lawsuits arguing who did what when, etc.
(B) They could break up Microsoft into "OS" and "Application" groups. Harder than it might seem -- IIS (OS?) is intimately tied into IE (app). Likewise, Office 2000 (app) will have an "Office Server" (OS) tied into NT and IIS. Besides - a split-in-half Microsoft is two giant monopolies rather than one.
(C) They could force Microsoft to give the source code away. I'm sure all of you Unix hackers would love to go fix Win98. What would be more likely to happen would that the hardware vendors and third parties would patch it together to work with their stuff. Imagine an "IBM Windows" or "Compaq Windows" or "RedHat Windows with Gnome", all slightly incompatible. Er, wait, that's just like Linux. Bottom line is that current MS customers wouldn't be too happy with this option.
(D) The DoJ can wage a war of attrition. Microsoft is basically a big Ponzi scheme that can afford (through paper stock options) to make very smart people work real hard for them. If the stock starts dropping, so will the intelligent people that keep MS on top. Much like the IBM case, by the time it's all over, it might be a moot point.
(There is a very interesting article over on PC week talking about how the various mid-level millionares over at Microsoft are basically unmanagible, and this is one of the reasons for the lateness of Windows 2000.)
If anyone else has some interesting ideas on what the government should do to stop Microsoft, I'd like to read them. None of the above seems all that great to me.
Ya - Same goes for the military freaks and their Billion Dollar B-2 Bombers. Those of us that actually work for a living and have to pay taxes may never get to fly around in this great plane WE paid for, and that truly is a shame.
Well, if you'd look at those books, you'd discover that 90% of what's in there are the keys for your desktop wallpaper or screen saver or whatever. I'm sure if you published a book with every parameter used for the Linux kernal, KDE, WindowMaker, GNOME, Wine, X, sendmail, etc it would be 5 times as thick as those NT books.
Personally, I don't think the idea of a central configuation database is all that stupid. What's dumb is the structure that MS chose to implement, with application settings scattered to and fro in a manner such that not even the installers can keep track of it all. However, even in the mess that it's in, it's a lot more consistant than the myriad of unix config files with their widely differing structures.
Furthermore, the stated design of the Registry was that it was not supposed to be user-editable. Of course, there's a ton of useful settings in there that MS provided no dialog box for. For example, MS DNS (joke) virtually requires that you dig around in the reg. Furthermore, enforcing policies requires detailed knowledge of the reg.
(BTW, they are somewhat improving the sitation with a scripting interface that exists now in IIS and is system-wide in Win2K. I also should add that I've never seen an NT registry go corrupt like a 9x registry is certain to do.)
One thing I've noticed is that most Mac users do a pretty good job of supporting their own computers, including upgrading the OS and installing hardware.
This of course drives tech support people nuts -- Imagine a graphic artist doing the hidden mysteries that only they can do! The only logical conclusion is that the funky Apple computer is shit.
Of course this is due to the fact that the MacOS was designed from the ground up to be easy to support.
Those of you who believe that Linux+KDE/Gnome, with a little more work, can be as easy to adminster as Macs are kidding yourselves. Essentially that's what they tried to do with Windows, and failed. I don't have very much faith that the very qualified Linux programmers or even MacOS-X project can put a pretty face on the UNIX mess and expect it as supportable as the MacOS.
(Of course many Linux users don't want Linux to be easy, but that's not "world domination"!)
1) I wonder if this is really a concrete plan or if it is just being 'floated' to gauge user and IT reaction. Washington politicians do this sort of thing all the time.
2) Having a machine-based CPU ID seems to run counter to the MS-backed Smart Card initiative, which associates the unique ID to the user, not the computer. MS's "Intellimirror" app distribution system is based on user credentials rather than computers, for example.
3) Anyone who thinks they can re-introduce copy protection in general market software has really been smoking lots of crack. Copy protection only kinda-sorta worked in the early 80s, when the computer market was much much smaller. (Or for very low volume apps, like those on Sun.) Imagine if even 1% of Windows XX users had some sort of copy protection problem due to to a CPU UID problem. That would be enough support calls to drive MS out of business.
Hmmm, I thought that 30-some percent of the installed base still runs DOS or Windows 3.1. In the server market, there are still tons of Netware 3.x boxes out there.
Migration is a *slow* process, and it certainly might take 10 years for linux to displace WinNT for applicaiton servers. On the other hand, linux can sneak in *now* for apps that NT isn't good at or doesn't run (Oracle, proxying, firwall, DNS, etc).
Hmmm, MS announces that Win2K is going to be later than ever, ZDNet suddenly starts printing lots-o Linux articles.
No conspiricy -- just that outlets like ZD rely on NEW NEW NEW to sell their press, and right now Microsoft ain't delivering. So they go elsewhere.
Just like back when Windows 95 kept getting delayed and more delayed, and all of a sudden ZD started printing lots of OS/2 Warp articles. As soon as 95 came out, they dropped Warp press ASAP. I'd expect them to do the same with Linux as soon as Win2000 is out.
(BTW, there seems to be a divergence in opinion in Linux space. Slashdotters seem to think that the mainstream press sucks and they should go away. Others are writting them and compaining that their WordPerfect/Linux writeup was not as long as the MS Office one.)
Is this product being sold to "self respecting Linux gurus" or is it being sold to small businesses that can't afford computer nerds?
I would guess there's a huge market for the latter -- in alot of companies the "system admin" is also the receptionist just cuz they use MS Word the most. They don't care that it runs linux, they want Internet.
I find this report odd. In my experience a well designed Domino server can stay up for months without problems.
(I'll admin that the client was a unstable piece of crap between 4.0 and about 4.5.2. But it's rock solid now (4.63) Try the latest patches - you'll be happier.)
Do you have any clue what your talking about?
RPC calls should be implemented on the Network layer (3)? Name one system other than routers that does that!
Mail encryption in Notes is only enabled if the user or the server admin turns it on. It's a Feee-ture.
Save confilcts do happen, but they are usually the result of a poor database design. Notes is by no means a SQL replacement. If you've been using Notes for all these years, one might think you'd have more of a clue.
I'm fine with "1394", but I doubt Joe Consumer would be. The big thing that's going to prohibit consumer adoption is the confusion spread by ten different naming standards (and not the $1 toll).
Techie: "Just plug the iLink into the Firewire and then the Firewire into the DV-o-licious and that into the 1394. Plug and Play!!"
Consumer: "Wha? I think I'll just use USB."
Seven some responses to this post, and not one person can get around to mentioning that FIPS (if you'd bother to look at the link) is a cryptographic standard, and that '"FIPS 140-1 is very important, but there aren't enough products to buy," says the Defense Department's Schaeffer'.
Instead we get a bunch of moronic posts discussing how Linux is a better web server and how NT Admins are point-and-click. And one guy who's so mad at Microsoft, that he sounds like he's about to cry.
My guess is that FIPS is some sort of artificial standard that will only be in certain very specialized applications. No, the federal government is not going to dump NT and install Linux on all of the Bureau of Agriculture's 486-50s! In fact, odds are that Linux will never be FIPS-certified, nor will anyone really even care.
Why is this place reminding me of an Amiga BBS?
Yeah, Mac users will certainly reject non-standard widgets. Look at MS Office 4.2, which was slammed for looking too much like Windows (although it didn't).
That is, except for the Mac users too busy hating Microsoft to load IE!
Since any nine year old can connect gameboys together, and presumably not bend the pins or gunk up the cables, I don't see how this is a bad thing!
Especially when compared to the expensive hell of different SCSI cable specs, connectors, and terminators.
Customers purchasing *products*, not ISP services. On a closed system like AOL, one can understand how AOL can get a cut of purchases within their closed system. But on a publicly accessible system like MSN, it unlikely that MSN subscribers patronize MSN sites at any higher rate than non-MSN subscribers. Especially since the default config of MSIE dumps you into MSN through the home page and channel bar, no matter who your ISP is.
Back to the original point - buying MSN is like buying Netcom, minus the equipment and network.
I thought pretty much all of MSN's services are now availible to every web user, and MSN itself was now a standard PPP dial-in ISP. (No more funky client.) Furthermore, they've got no 'network' of their own, but lease bandwidth on UUnet.
If so, ATT is really not buying a online service, but just buying customers. Who cares.
Keep saying it, but you might be dead wrong.
Sony has plans to make Firewire a univeral interconnect for stereo systems. Just replace that ratsnest of RCA plugs and digital interconnects with one firewire chain. Sounds like a good idea to me.
(Agreed that a Firewire keyboard will probably not see the light of day, tho.)