All those tools need to agree on a very exact format specs or else the user cannot use the tools together.
All those tools need to operate in roughly the same way or else the user will have to learn a lot more.
All those tool developers need to remember that 99% of their market is for that subset of features that the dedicated application needs. Thus, adding much more will bloat it with complexity and size that simply does not reward the user.
All those tool developers all need to setup their applications with the majority of the users tasks in mind so they don't force the users to do more work than is necessary.
All those tool developers should provide a certain amount of interoperability besides just file formating and such. e.g., How does the user perform an "undo" after one tool has been applied?
All those tools need to agree to collaborate on support problems rather than pointing fingers at other tools.
The point is that creating seperate tools in this fashion is simply not appropriate for most applications. The organization and development costs for this "tool" methodology to make it appropriate for the end users totally exceeds the costs to produce a superior application under the "traditional" unified application framework. The analogy that I'd make, in response to the "tool box" analogy, is what tool do most users, that actually use tools, actually carry with them? A leatherman (and maybe a limited toolbox at home). The toolbox is too bulky and ackward in most situations where a leatherman (or like tool) is totally appropriate.
What you are doing is laughing at the Swiss Army knife that is MS and kin that tries to be everything to all people and assuming that the toolbox is the best solution because the swiss army knife is almost useless. Well it's not impossible to devise a better unified tool than both for most users. Its name is the Leatherman;) While there is still plenty of room for the toolbox, its use is largely confined to professionals and enthusiasts that require a high degree of specialization.
I'd like to make another point that /. forgets.
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I STILL Want My HDTV
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· Score: 2
While progress, in and of itself, may be good, that doesn't mean that it's worthwhile at any cost. What's more, this determination is largely made by consumers, not by companies. Take this HDTV roll out, for instance, if enough customers were willing and capable of paying enough money to even cover all the costs and the risks (e.g., increased production costs, increased infrastructure costs, labor, etc. Not to mention a relatively nominal profit for the companies), then HDTV would probably be a reality. The truth of the matter is that this is not the case now. It's simply not worth that kind of money to enough people now.
HDTV, or the lack thereof, is simply not the companies' fault. It may not be the consumers "fault" either; they are just making a determination about what is best for them. Maybe the consumer is misinformed or, maybe, they just have greater priorities were they'd rather spend their finite resources. Maybe having more content on TV is more important to them than seeing it in higher quality....
This brings me to another very important point. That resources not spent here, on rolling out HDTV, are spent on pursuits that are more worthwhile (as determined by consumers). Maybe not by the television industry itself, but within the capital markets, labor markets, etc. This may mean more resources for the development of life saving drugs, better cars, and what have you.
The bottom line is that I am not upset with anyone about this. I may personally be willing to spend the cash (and then some) for HDTV, but I am mature enough to realize that my preferences are not necessarily in line with what society needs and wants. I would not want some regulatory body really forcing this matter on the companies and society in general. This situation, and most like it, simply do not call for regulation.
[Note: Cleaner cars and such are an entirely different scenario and a seperate argument because none of the consumers pay for the pollution that they personally pollute.]
Please folks... substituting MS for a society where companies cannot compete due to fear of lawsuits is about 100x worse. Be messed up bad, and now they want a lawsuit to recover as much as they can. I hope that the libertarian folks among you can see this at least.
Be may have been fundamentally flawed since its inception, however this doesn't mean that they weren't harmed by MS. The fact of the matter is is that given the circumstances (e.g., the nature of the industry, MS' monopoly, etc), this action is terribly anti-competive, so much so as to make any form of organic competition almost impossible. This kind of strong arm tactic poses no real advantage to anyone, except for MS and their desire to maintain their monopoly. It's simply unreasonable to say that this is "competetive", when it is, in fact, quite the opposite.
When MS controls the market like this, this deal is not optional for the OEMs. Consumers demand MS windows and they want the cheapest prices they can find, all other things being equal. An OEM that either cannot furnish Windows pre-installed or cannot furnish it at a competetive price is dead for all intents and purposes. Thus, there is no option for the OEM. Although you might argue that this creates room for niche OEMs to sell alternative OSes (note: They are few and far between), it adds a very large premium onto the price of the end product. The reason for this is simple. Only the larger OEMs can generate enough volume to compete on hardware pricing. It's not at all unusual, for instance, to see a smaller OEM buying the same equipment for 5% more than the larger OEMs sells the equipment for (that's AFTER their profit and additional costs). Depending on the kind of system you are talking about, the difference can be between 20-30% of the price of the system all told. Even then, the consumer still has to worry about the quality of the OEM.
So what this all means at the end of the day. Is that BeOS, or whatever OS you prefer, is just STARTING to compete with, say, a 300-400 dollar disadvantage on the hardware (and associated service) and a likely inferior OEM that the customer is not familiar with. That's not competition; it has nothing to do with what the alternative OS company can be reasonably expected to bring to the table.
In other words, even if a company could come out with a version of windows that was perfectly compatible and looked and felt exactly the same as windows with 10% fewer crashes and 10% speed increase [and this is a long shot given other facts], they would have a damn hard time selling it in any significant number.
This particular form of anti-competive advantage means that no mere significant, but incremental, gain in over all quality is going to win customers. Only a very large jump in quality [enough to justify the huge premium paid and/or a massive surge in preference] will even put a competing company on the map and that's ignoring the other issues entirely. This is just one anti-competetive act, mind you. You add this with MS' other behavior and you have a damn near unseatable monopoly and none of it has anything to do with MS or their competitors' product.
The end result is that MS rarely has any incentive to improve their desktop OS since they have no credible threats. The amount of money that they invest in Windows is a pittance compared to the size of the market.
And the GPL is good because how often has it happened that good code was lost because the company went under.
That is a non sequitur. It may be true that what code the company produces under the GPL is not lost. However, if you want to say that GPL is better on the aggregate, then you also need to show that these GPL-based companies are producing more GPL code to begin with. If the GPL itself discourages the production of code to begin with, then you can hardly say it is better to have 100% of almost nothing. Likewise, if the company dies due to its GPL nature and thus ceases the production of code and the best the community can do with it is barely maintain it, then we'd be better off with a vital non-GPL company that can do a lot better than this.
Personally, I happen to think the above two points I raised are the rule, not the exception. It's not exactly as if there's a great deal of successful companies that produce high quality code under the GPL, quite the opposite in fact. GPL has a large number of failures, non-deliveries, leaches, lightweights, and outright scams. Where are the successes? Few and far between.
I don't necessarily buy into this argument, BUT...
Larry is almost certainly thinking of the advantages of commodity nature of the hardware (Intel) [once you get past some of the market speak] not to the nature of the software that happens to run on it (Linux).
Sun is focused largely on HARDWARE, not software. Oracle is primarily about SOFTWARE, not hardware. Oracle can quite easily port their entire line of software, ergo, you're comparing apples and oranges.
The stockmarket is down on Palm because they are having to chase ever lower margins at the low end of the business.
The stock market was up on DotComs too...and about a zillion other companies. The stock market is easily impressed by glitz. Anyways, margins may be relevant, but you're making a big jump here claiming that it is because of margins and not because of other issues (e.g., major inventory issue). You're also making a mistake in automatically assuming the price == margin. Palm sells their less than state of the art devices for nice margins based on its name brand, wide spread use, and simple things like styling (e.g., Palm V). They've also got some very nice margins on PalmOS licensing at about 1.50 a unit. Compare this with Compaq and others that are fighting to pack the most state of the art components in but are adding little value in as a company....
I am none too happy with my Palm VII's use of batteries. I would much prefer a rechargeable battery provided it recharges in the cradle. I understand that that is available on some models, but none with the power sucking wireless capability.
Well I've not used PalmVII extensively, but I have used most others. They get excellent battery life. I've got a PalmVx and i use it regularly and charge it about once every 3 weeks without issue. Name one PocketPC device that can do this. Also, compare the battery life on the power draining wireless features of other PocketPCs while you're at it too.
As for the new models, I have watched too many technology companies die waiting for the radical reshaping of their product line. Sinclair died when the QL turned out to fall just short of the PC competitor it was meant to be. Apple almost went belly-up with the Apple III.
Ergo they are dead? I disagree. You're also neglecting the fact that Palm is still very much king of the hill here. You could have argued much the same for DOS, Win3.11, Win95...
Palm has succeeded in the market [~20m is pretty impressive] because they know precisely what they're about. Many people have tried to make PDA-like devices, but failed because they either tried to exceed hardware limitations or tried to make their OS/Apps do too much, ignoring the actual useful applications that people would use them for.
The modern PocketPC may be quite a bit further along, but it's really not there yet. It offers few worthwhile reasons to switch and many drawbacks. I mean, for the extra 100-300 dollars, what do you get precisely? You certainly get far inferior battery life [especially if you try to use the handheld as the computer it is marketed to be, not as a PDA]. You get an interface that is not nearly as well designed for actual PDA usage. Palm's UI, while it may not be very pretty by todays standards, is fast and is easy to operate proficiently on the go. In short, while PocketPC may _technically_ be able to run all the PDA applications, it does a significantly inferior job of it on the aggregate.
In it's place....we get what? Word and Excel are only be a frustration for the average person to operate. Even for advanced users, it's pretty frustrating. Mp3s? The storage capacity is not nearly there for me at least and the sound quality is pretty flat.... Where's a real application that people will actually buy?
It's not as if you can say that Palm has been or is a failure. They've got the vast majority of the PDA marketshare and they're still controlling roughly 80% of NEW PDA sales DESPITE the presence of these nifty PocketPC gadgets [not to mention the muscle of one very large company].
You may be correct that it is an evolving market. However, many signs show that Palm is adapting appropriately. They're clearly positioning for a radical change (e.g., StrongARM, Be, etc.)... from what I can tell, when the time is right. What opportunity have they missed out on exactly? The opportunity to sell to some bleeding edge techies for some short lived time while the next latest and greatest device comes along? That's not how you run a profitable business.
They can test and develop software and hardware quite well without having to spend millions on marketing devices to consumers before they're appropriate. You assert that PocketPC is a success, but has anyone really made any money on it yet when all is considered? I don't think so.
There may be limits in theory, but the reality is that many places ask for it. e.g., credit card companies. In any event, even if this card had some kind of unique identifier associated with it, those same laws could be put into effect with the same degree of success. What's more, unlike the social security number, a strong photographic ID does not necessarily have a number that companies can use to track you with. If the card is smartcard-like, it may simply give the person reviewing the user/card a one time token to reference an online database with to vouch for the cards integrity.
In any event, the entire discussion is rather academic if you ask me. The simple fact of the matter here is that the vast majority of the public, virtually EVERYONE that companies may want to track, can already be tracked just fine. It's simply not that big of a deal, because the kind of paranoid fantasies of some here offer little but trouble to the companies that have the capability.
We already have a single ID, it's called a social security number. Virtually every legitimate citizen in this country has one. It may not provide positive photographic or biometric ID, but for the purposes of a database, it is every bit as enabling. In other words, this would change nothing in that respect.
Where did he say he wants _all_ our information in a central database? There is a world of difference between having a reasonably secure national ID system that contains reasonable identification measures and _all_ of information (e.g., habits, medical history, etc) in one system. As much as I find Ellison a despicable person, please do not put words in his mouth or misrepresent the words of anyone that might advocate this. It may well be true that he wants that to sell his product, but that's not the same as actually advocating that. Furthermore, this same argument could be said for MS or the developers of mysql even...
Discussing details, for me, is a sign of intelligence.
I disagree. Having the ability to get into details may be part of having a solid understanding of the subject matter, as opposed to having a superficial understanding, but it does not demonstrate understanding in and of itself. I've known many people that can tell you, for instance, the fastest video card in the world and all the specs, but they have no comprehension of the subject matter itself. I've also known some people that have an excellent grasp on the overall subject, but only know minimal information about the nitty gritty details. They may read and understand the details at one point, but quickly forget them later because they're unnecessary.
Dumb people, like our president, speak only in broad strokes and flub the details.
I disagree with this. I think the man is a lot smarter than people give him credit for, but he's no great intellect. Intelligence != Intellect.
So even if someone is discussing a topic that I know I'm a retard on and don't understand, I'll look to experts, get the topic explained, and see if I can't make an intelligent decision.
Sure, you may look to experts for insight, but even this takes considerable time. Which expert is the average non-technical person, even a smart person, supposed to refer to for your definitive Good/Bad answer? It's a lot more complex than that. You add this investment of time and energy up for all the various minute decisions and it adds up to a lot of time; some of us have lives to live and jobs to do.
Clinton was freaking bright. Slept around but bright. I miss him terribly.
I don't. The man was bright, brigher than GW in most departments [note: I wouldn't say the same for Gore], but at the end of the day, I'd far rather have someone like GW in office than him. Clinton accomplished very little, despite his intelligence. One of his problems was he had weak people around him. The man alone may have been capable of filling most any one of those shoes, but not them all together.
This country could do with more leaders who aren't getting elected through careful image management.
Yeah, we all know Clinton never managed his image or took extensive polls while in office. Puhlease, he's the biggest offender ever.
Do you not understand the expression "for instance"? It is not the same thing offering those two as the only two alternatives.
The point was that we can nickle and dime on the small stuff all day long, but, at the end of the day, it is still small stuff.
No matter which side of the Open Source/Closed Source debate you shake out on, the odds are you understand that the differences are not _that_ dramatic.
Payroll, however, surely represents the bulk of the costs of running the government and the quality of the people has a far greater impact on the performance of IT than the ideology of our software.
In other words, our time is better spent worrying about the bigger issues like organized labor, where we have enough leverage to get some return on our efforts, than the thousands of possible areas that we can waste our time at, like whether or not we should use open source software. I'll leave that to the administrators. Thank you.
When was the last time that such minutia actually changed your vote one way or the other unless it directly affected you? Probably never.
Even if you THINK you do, I doubt you really do. In order to make an informed decision on these matters must spend SOME time learning the background and the difference between the competing alternatives. Even with an issue like Open Source, there is considerable debate in the technical community about whether or not it actually saves money and it's got to be even harder for the average person to make heads or tails of it. It's not as if there's a simple authoritative source you can go to that says Open Source > Closed Source. It may be trivial to discover that the software itself takes money to actually purchase, but finding out the actual support costs, training, quality of the software, and other elements takes a lot of time and intuition. Speaking for myself, I'd actually be opposed to this kind of adoption, especially in a government agency.
Now you're going to do this kind of research for each and every little item? Asphalt? Shovels? Paper? Paper clips? It may sound ridiculous, but I doubt software costs more than.5% of the local government costs. All these decisions take time, far too much time for the average voter to concern themselves with. We have public officials and representatives for a reason.
This argument is especially ridiculous when you consider that the kinds of day to day payroll decisions made by managers have a far greater impact and cost far more. For instance, would you rather have an experienced admin run NT or a bunch of clowns running Linux? I know which I'd pick. Yet it's blatantly obvious that we can't effectively engage in this kind of oversight.
But if the permissions on the passwd file were setup so as to only be readable by root, it is effectively the same as having a shadowed passwords, which would require the user to already have root privilages read the actual hashes. It would be rather trivial to do since it's a single user system and its use is rather specific.
I'm not saying this is what the configuration on this device is, but the article doesn't really deny this either.
Very interesting, and I'm not sure that I can refute it yet, or even that I want to. I don't hold the same views as RMS w.r.t. proprietary software. Still, I don't think it's fair to say that expensive software won't get built in RMS's world. Linux (or in RMS-speak GNU/Linux) got built despite the fact that it required >$1 billion in development costs. [dwheeler.com] And cost Linus nearly nothing to get the whole thing started.
I disagree. You're not paying enough attention to quality, difficulty, divergence from the needs/wants of the developer(s), overall complexity, development time, and so on. Put bluntly, the vast majority of the Linux distributions were developed by people working in their spare time for something that THEY personally wanted. This is really a key understanding.
Firstly, the very products that the developers were working on was for a product that they either enjoy developing or enjoy using (by and large). For instance, a developer may enjoy working on making his music encoder work 1% faster, but he hates the idea of spending countless hours of making an installation management system that works snaglessly for the end user.
Secondly, even the products that they're developing are being developed for THEIR pleasure. This means that, for instance, spending 2x the development time writing proper documentation is unlikely to bring them much joy or satisfaction, thus little to no time is spent writing proper documentation. This can also mean that certain software is left in that half-finished or half-usable state; it's finished enough that the developer(s) can use it for what they want, but not necessarily enough that outside users really can. This can (and does) mean that things like usability, speed, stability, UI, cooperation with other developers, and other elements suffer. I see this kind failure throughout the vast vast majority of Open Source software in the empirical sense. I also fail to see any theoretical motive/force/engine to carry products to the kind of fruition that many closed source products are known to reach.
Thirdly, the very scope of these individual projects is limited. You're including pretty much every line of code ever written for the more substantial open/free projects into this tally, but you're not looking at the number of lines of code written with a single project in mind where a great deal of cooperation and organization is required. This is, in my opinion, not terribly unlike, say, collecting counting the number of words of every term papers of every college student across the country this year and saying it costs the same amount to write as, say, the Encyclopedia Britannica because they have roughly the same number of lines. You must pay attention to the overall consistency not just the quality of its constituent parts.
Fourthly, the open/free source developers have had the benefit of riding on the heals of the closed/for-profit world. Many of the development projects are simply shadowing the features of proprietary products, little time needs to be spent on doing things like re-working the design of a UI because it fundamentally sucks. In addition, some are also motivated in an attempt to prove open/free source is capable/better because proprietary software basically rules. But what happens when open/free source is the only game in town? They no longer have anything to target or fight against. Also, the more complex of these projects surely have enjoyed the development/engineering skills of individuals that are either employed by proprietary software companies or learned their skill set with the ultimate goal of landing a job in the industry. When there's little to no money to be made developing big software, this will create a holes for open source. [Yes, I know many/most developers don't write shrink wrapped software, but proprietary software is broader than that and the skill set is still valuable]
Now, if you personally want a custom OS, paying someone to tweak linux with your customizations is a *lot* more affordable than starting from scratch. You can even keep those changes to your self, and not give them to anyone else. The *only* thing you can't do is release the software in a proprietary format. And, surprise surprise, this is exactly what's being done [tivo.com], over [cnet.com] and over [cnet.com] again. Some suspect that this is a trend. [cnet.com]
There is nothing fundamental to copyright and patent law that prevents similar arrangments for proprietary companies. They can control the distribution of their code and certainly the use of the product using IP laws, without having to be the sole user of the code itself. There's no reason why someone like Sun couldn't license their code out for modifications.
Also, we already have an example of a business model where legislated openness has created some monster organizations. The pharmaceutical industry, under the governance of the FDA, is required to publish their drugs before a very long and drawn out peer review. That doesn't keep them from pooling the resources necessary to develop hundreds of failed drugs for every 1 successful drug.
My issue is not with openness itself. It can be a very good thing. The issue is one of control. The medical devices/technology/drug industry (which I happen to work in) still have a great deal of control over the fruits of their labor due to intellectual property laws which allow them the real possibility of actually profiting from their labors. RMS and company basically expressly forbid this kind of control so there is no real comparison.
But if RMS's ideas of free software are legislated, that doesn't preclude hiring someone to code up the types of changes that you want made. It doesn't preclude you from using those features exclusively. It only precludes you from releasing those changes as proprietary software.
It may allow me to hire someone to write an application for me personally or for my organization as long as the code is opened. However, this ignores the very major problem that the worth to an individual, or even to a handful of individuals is often worth much less than the total development costs. For instance, it may cost 50m dollars to develop an Office suite that I can really use, but that doesn't mean that it is worth 50m to me alone or even that I can afford it. If it's only worth 10k to me (and to all the other individuals/organizations), then the application will simply never get built in RMS' world.
Conversely, in the closed source world, if that same 50m dollar development cost of the product is worth just 100 dollars to 500k users then the everyone can just possibly get what they want. The closed source world both keeps people honest (e.g., pay for their fair share) and allocates resources much more efficiently.
In other words, in actuality, the open source world effectively prevents pooling of interests/resources [as much as it may claim the opposite] while closed source encourages it [even if it's done entirely out of self-interest]. Even completely ignoring other issues (e.g., profit motive) this is a deal breaker. It's simply not in the best interests for consumers on the aggregate nor it is for the developers [as they'll never be employed on projects where large scale and leverage is required].
No, I'm not advocating slavery at all. I simply assert that users presently have a choice (and a superior option) in so-called closed or non-free software. If open source developers wish to change the laws to require the open/free software, then I believe the onus should at least be on them [the advocates] to fill that void that they created by developing the software that meets the users needs and wants [even though I think it's rather impossible]. If they are are unwilling to do this, then it is unreasonable to ask in the first place.
On the other hand, if this "all free all the time" situation were to arise naturally and on its own, then I could not reasonably ask this of developers.
I'm not saying that your "choices" are incorrect or unfair in and of themselves. As long as there is real choice, as there generally is with the status quo, then I have no issue with your "choices."
However, I was making that point that many people essentially assert your view of the choices and assert that it is improper/unethical/worse/whatever to allow non-free/proprietary software to exist. In effect, they're forcing users to adopt the "choices" that you have laid out. In the open/free software world, the end user gets little to no independent influence (as a distinction from what the developer(s) themselves want) over the product. If the only game in town is open/free software, then "put up or shutup" (your choice) is all that is offered. This is what I take issue with but I'm not saying that you are necessarily guilty of it.
There are a number of people that would do away with proprietary software if it were up to them. Yet many of these same people also take the same attitude that you're taking, that no one has the the right to complain about free/open source software? Well who exactly do users complain to in a purely Open Source world? Who makes sure that their needs are met? No one really.
If there's real choice, then I can understand and appreciate your position. But if you're one that advocates removing choice from the customer (like RMS), then you better at least be responsive to the needs of the (potential) users.
I [sic] you always perform honorably then you should have no problem with Sole Prop. method and you make the most this way.
This is quite wrong for a number of reasons.
Firstly, even if he does nothing wrong, it's still possible to get sued for big bucks. This is especially true if he has any worthwhile assets, such as a house, outside of his actual business. It happens more often than you think.
Secondly, even without getting sued, he is still liable for any and all debts of his business under a proprietorship. Whereas under a corporation, he would generally not be.
Thirdly, if he ever wants substantial investment, the investors will likely demand that he form a corporation so that they cannot be held personally liable (for either of the above reasons).
Lastly, the particular laws and taxes can vary substantially from state to state. I would not be so quick to make a recommendation, especially without having a feel for the size and the scope of his desired business.
Although I agree with you with most of your skepticism about the worth and importance of 3G, having used Blackberry (not a cell phone, I know) I must say that I find it _very_ nice. It's not a "thumb" keyboard, not "real", but still quite effective and painless. I can write 30+ wpm comfortably, enough to make the service very worthwhile in my opinion. I suspect I might find the Handspring Treo to be equally useful and in a better configuration (e.g., fewer devices).
Of course, none of this requires 3G. However, I do think that having the ability to get at least a 56k connection _reliably_ has a great deal of potential. Much past that point I do not see any obvious utility other than perhaps for mobile laptops, certainly not enough to justify spending inordinantly more for 2-3G level service.
Re:Innovation? Yes. Better than a scooter? No.
on
This is IT?
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· Score: 2
Kamen is best known for his medical inventions: for example, he came up with the first wearable infusion pump, a Godsend to a certain type of diabetic who must have a steady influx of insulin to function well.
I happen to work for one of the more major players in insulin Infusion pump industry. While you're correct that pump therapy can be very beneficial to the health and quality of life of individuals with type 1 diabetes, Kamen's influence is exxagerated. His device was very primitive, far too primitive to be useful for the vast majority of today's (or tomorrow's) patients. This is where the "real" work is done in the world of innovation, besides just being the point where real utility is created. It can hardly even be argued that his pump played an important role in the development as all the devices that have reached the mass market have taken (a) different path(s). Sure, he made some money by selling it to another company, but nothing much ever came of it.
I'm not an expert on his other inventions/innovations, but from what I've seen of his intellectual property myself and from what I've heard from other engineers/entrepreneurs, of whom i have a great deal of respect for, that I know inside and outside of the medical devices industry (his primary field) they're not either. I don't mean to dump on Kamen, but I would hardly say the potential of the Segway (IT) follows from his track record.
Actually truth be told I think his wheelchair-like device has the greatest potential if his design can be manufactured, produced, maintained, etc. properly.
Slashdot Mirror
Just curious.
All those tools need to agree on a very exact format specs or else the user cannot use the tools together.
;) While there is still plenty of room for the toolbox, its use is largely confined to professionals and enthusiasts that require a high degree of specialization.
All those tools need to operate in roughly the same way or else the user will have to learn a lot more.
All those tool developers need to remember that 99% of their market is for that subset of features that the dedicated application needs. Thus, adding much more will bloat it with complexity and size that simply does not reward the user.
All those tool developers all need to setup their applications with the majority of the users tasks in mind so they don't force the users to do more work than is necessary.
All those tool developers should provide a certain amount of interoperability besides just file formating and such. e.g., How does the user perform an "undo" after one tool has been applied?
All those tools need to agree to collaborate on support problems rather than pointing fingers at other tools.
The point is that creating seperate tools in this fashion is simply not appropriate for most applications. The organization and development costs for this "tool" methodology to make it appropriate for the end users totally exceeds the costs to produce a superior application under the "traditional" unified application framework. The analogy that I'd make, in response to the "tool box" analogy, is what tool do most users, that actually use tools, actually carry with them? A leatherman (and maybe a limited toolbox at home). The toolbox is too bulky and ackward in most situations where a leatherman (or like tool) is totally appropriate.
What you are doing is laughing at the Swiss Army knife that is MS and kin that tries to be everything to all people and assuming that the toolbox is the best solution because the swiss army knife is almost useless. Well it's not impossible to devise a better unified tool than both for most users. Its name is the Leatherman
While progress, in and of itself, may be good, that doesn't mean that it's worthwhile at any cost. What's more, this determination is largely made by consumers, not by companies. Take this HDTV roll out, for instance, if enough customers were willing and capable of paying enough money to even cover all the costs and the risks (e.g., increased production costs, increased infrastructure costs, labor, etc. Not to mention a relatively nominal profit for the companies), then HDTV would probably be a reality. The truth of the matter is that this is not the case now. It's simply not worth that kind of money to enough people now.
HDTV, or the lack thereof, is simply not the companies' fault. It may not be the consumers "fault" either; they are just making a determination about what is best for them. Maybe the consumer is misinformed or, maybe, they just have greater priorities were they'd rather spend their finite resources. Maybe having more content on TV is more important to them than seeing it in higher quality....
This brings me to another very important point. That resources not spent here, on rolling out HDTV, are spent on pursuits that are more worthwhile (as determined by consumers). Maybe not by the television industry itself, but within the capital markets, labor markets, etc. This may mean more resources for the development of life saving drugs, better cars, and what have you.
The bottom line is that I am not upset with anyone about this. I may personally be willing to spend the cash (and then some) for HDTV, but I am mature enough to realize that my preferences are not necessarily in line with what society needs and wants. I would not want some regulatory body really forcing this matter on the companies and society in general. This situation, and most like it, simply do not call for regulation.
[Note: Cleaner cars and such are an entirely different scenario and a seperate argument because none of the consumers pay for the pollution that they personally pollute.]
When MS controls the market like this, this deal is not optional for the OEMs. Consumers demand MS windows and they want the cheapest prices they can find, all other things being equal. An OEM that either cannot furnish Windows pre-installed or cannot furnish it at a competetive price is dead for all intents and purposes. Thus, there is no option for the OEM. Although you might argue that this creates room for niche OEMs to sell alternative OSes (note: They are few and far between), it adds a very large premium onto the price of the end product. The reason for this is simple. Only the larger OEMs can generate enough volume to compete on hardware pricing. It's not at all unusual, for instance, to see a smaller OEM buying the same equipment for 5% more than the larger OEMs sells the equipment for (that's AFTER their profit and additional costs). Depending on the kind of system you are talking about, the difference can be between 20-30% of the price of the system all told. Even then, the consumer still has to worry about the quality of the OEM.
So what this all means at the end of the day. Is that BeOS, or whatever OS you prefer, is just STARTING to compete with, say, a 300-400 dollar disadvantage on the hardware (and associated service) and a likely inferior OEM that the customer is not familiar with. That's not competition; it has nothing to do with what the alternative OS company can be reasonably expected to bring to the table.
In other words, even if a company could come out with a version of windows that was perfectly compatible and looked and felt exactly the same as windows with 10% fewer crashes and 10% speed increase [and this is a long shot given other facts], they would have a damn hard time selling it in any significant number.
This particular form of anti-competive advantage means that no mere significant, but incremental, gain in over all quality is going to win customers. Only a very large jump in quality [enough to justify the huge premium paid and/or a massive surge in preference] will even put a competing company on the map and that's ignoring the other issues entirely. This is just one anti-competetive act, mind you. You add this with MS' other behavior and you have a damn near unseatable monopoly and none of it has anything to do with MS or their competitors' product.
The end result is that MS rarely has any incentive to improve their desktop OS since they have no credible threats. The amount of money that they invest in Windows is a pittance compared to the size of the market.
Yes, you can.
Personally, I happen to think the above two points I raised are the rule, not the exception. It's not exactly as if there's a great deal of successful companies that produce high quality code under the GPL, quite the opposite in fact. GPL has a large number of failures, non-deliveries, leaches, lightweights, and outright scams. Where are the successes? Few and far between.
I don't necessarily buy into this argument, BUT...
Larry is almost certainly thinking of the advantages of commodity nature of the hardware (Intel) [once you get past some of the market speak] not to the nature of the software that happens to run on it (Linux).
Sun is focused largely on HARDWARE, not software. Oracle is primarily about SOFTWARE, not hardware. Oracle can quite easily port their entire line of software, ergo, you're comparing apples and oranges.
And apparently it gets SLOWER on shorter and smaller networks! Mine slowed down to 5 miles per hour on my crossover!@@#!
The stock market was up on DotComs too...and about a zillion other companies. The stock market is easily impressed by glitz. Anyways, margins may be relevant, but you're making a big jump here claiming that it is because of margins and not because of other issues (e.g., major inventory issue). You're also making a mistake in automatically assuming the price == margin. Palm sells their less than state of the art devices for nice margins based on its name brand, wide spread use, and simple things like styling (e.g., Palm V). They've also got some very nice margins on PalmOS licensing at about 1.50 a unit. Compare this with Compaq and others that are fighting to pack the most state of the art components in but are adding little value in as a company....
Well I've not used PalmVII extensively, but I have used most others. They get excellent battery life. I've got a PalmVx and i use it regularly and charge it about once every 3 weeks without issue. Name one PocketPC device that can do this. Also, compare the battery life on the power draining wireless features of other PocketPCs while you're at it too.
Ergo they are dead? I disagree. You're also neglecting the fact that Palm is still very much king of the hill here. You could have argued much the same for DOS, Win3.11, Win95...
Palm has succeeded in the market [~20m is pretty impressive] because they know precisely what they're about. Many people have tried to make PDA-like devices, but failed because they either tried to exceed hardware limitations or tried to make their OS/Apps do too much, ignoring the actual useful applications that people would use them for.
... Where's a real application that people will actually buy?
... from what I can tell, when the time is right. What opportunity have they missed out on exactly? The opportunity to sell to some bleeding edge techies for some short lived time while the next latest and greatest device comes along? That's not how you run a profitable business.
The modern PocketPC may be quite a bit further along, but it's really not there yet. It offers few worthwhile reasons to switch and many drawbacks. I mean, for the extra 100-300 dollars, what do you get precisely? You certainly get far inferior battery life [especially if you try to use the handheld as the computer it is marketed to be, not as a PDA]. You get an interface that is not nearly as well designed for actual PDA usage. Palm's UI, while it may not be very pretty by todays standards, is fast and is easy to operate proficiently on the go. In short, while PocketPC may _technically_ be able to run all the PDA applications, it does a significantly inferior job of it on the aggregate.
In it's place....we get what? Word and Excel are only be a frustration for the average person to operate. Even for advanced users, it's pretty frustrating. Mp3s? The storage capacity is not nearly there for me at least and the sound quality is pretty flat.
It's not as if you can say that Palm has been or is a failure. They've got the vast majority of the PDA marketshare and they're still controlling roughly 80% of NEW PDA sales DESPITE the presence of these nifty PocketPC gadgets [not to mention the muscle of one very large company].
You may be correct that it is an evolving market. However, many signs show that Palm is adapting appropriately. They're clearly positioning for a radical change (e.g., StrongARM, Be, etc.)
They can test and develop software and hardware quite well without having to spend millions on marketing devices to consumers before they're appropriate. You assert that PocketPC is a success, but has anyone really made any money on it yet when all is considered? I don't think so.
There may be limits in theory, but the reality is that many places ask for it. e.g., credit card companies. In any event, even if this card had some kind of unique identifier associated with it, those same laws could be put into effect with the same degree of success. What's more, unlike the social security number, a strong photographic ID does not necessarily have a number that companies can use to track you with. If the card is smartcard-like, it may simply give the person reviewing the user/card a one time token to reference an online database with to vouch for the cards integrity.
In any event, the entire discussion is rather academic if you ask me. The simple fact of the matter here is that the vast majority of the public, virtually EVERYONE that companies may want to track, can already be tracked just fine. It's simply not that big of a deal, because the kind of paranoid fantasies of some here offer little but trouble to the companies that have the capability.
We already have a single ID, it's called a social security number. Virtually every legitimate citizen in this country has one. It may not provide positive photographic or biometric ID, but for the purposes of a database, it is every bit as enabling. In other words, this would change nothing in that respect.
Where did he say he wants _all_ our information in a central database? There is a world of difference between having a reasonably secure national ID system that contains reasonable identification measures and _all_ of information (e.g., habits, medical history, etc) in one system. As much as I find Ellison a despicable person, please do not put words in his mouth or misrepresent the words of anyone that might advocate this. It may well be true that he wants that to sell his product, but that's not the same as actually advocating that. Furthermore, this same argument could be said for MS or the developers of mysql even...
I disagree with this. I think the man is a lot smarter than people give him credit for, but he's no great intellect. Intelligence != Intellect.
Sure, you may look to experts for insight, but even this takes considerable time. Which expert is the average non-technical person, even a smart person, supposed to refer to for your definitive Good/Bad answer? It's a lot more complex than that. You add this investment of time and energy up for all the various minute decisions and it adds up to a lot of time; some of us have lives to live and jobs to do.
I don't. The man was bright, brigher than GW in most departments [note: I wouldn't say the same for Gore], but at the end of the day, I'd far rather have someone like GW in office than him. Clinton accomplished very little, despite his intelligence. One of his problems was he had weak people around him. The man alone may have been capable of filling most any one of those shoes, but not them all together.
Yeah, we all know Clinton never managed his image or took extensive polls while in office. Puhlease, he's the biggest offender ever.
Do you not understand the expression "for instance"? It is not the same thing offering those two as the only two alternatives.
The point was that we can nickle and dime on the small stuff all day long, but, at the end of the day, it is still small stuff.
No matter which side of the Open Source/Closed Source debate you shake out on, the odds are you understand that the differences are not _that_ dramatic.
Payroll, however, surely represents the bulk of the costs of running the government and the quality of the people has a far greater impact on the performance of IT than the ideology of our software.
In other words, our time is better spent worrying about the bigger issues like organized labor, where we have enough leverage to get some return on our efforts, than the thousands of possible areas that we can waste our time at, like whether or not we should use open source software. I'll leave that to the administrators. Thank you.
When was the last time that such minutia actually changed your vote one way or the other unless it directly affected you? Probably never.
.5% of the local government costs. All these decisions take time, far too much time for the average voter to concern themselves with. We have public officials and representatives for a reason.
Even if you THINK you do, I doubt you really do. In order to make an informed decision on these matters must spend SOME time learning the background and the difference between the competing alternatives. Even with an issue like Open Source, there is considerable debate in the technical community about whether or not it actually saves money and it's got to be even harder for the average person to make heads or tails of it. It's not as if there's a simple authoritative source you can go to that says Open Source > Closed Source. It may be trivial to discover that the software itself takes money to actually purchase, but finding out the actual support costs, training, quality of the software, and other elements takes a lot of time and intuition. Speaking for myself, I'd actually be opposed to this kind of adoption, especially in a government agency.
Now you're going to do this kind of research for each and every little item? Asphalt? Shovels? Paper? Paper clips? It may sound ridiculous, but I doubt software costs more than
This argument is especially ridiculous when you consider that the kinds of day to day payroll decisions made by managers have a far greater impact and cost far more. For instance, would you rather have an experienced admin run NT or a bunch of clowns running Linux? I know which I'd pick. Yet it's blatantly obvious that we can't effectively engage in this kind of oversight.
But if the permissions on the passwd file were setup so as to only be readable by root, it is effectively the same as having a shadowed passwords, which would require the user to already have root privilages read the actual hashes. It would be rather trivial to do since it's a single user system and its use is rather specific.
I'm not saying this is what the configuration on this device is, but the article doesn't really deny this either.
Firstly, the very products that the developers were working on was for a product that they either enjoy developing or enjoy using (by and large). For instance, a developer may enjoy working on making his music encoder work 1% faster, but he hates the idea of spending countless hours of making an installation management system that works snaglessly for the end user.
Secondly, even the products that they're developing are being developed for THEIR pleasure. This means that, for instance, spending 2x the development time writing proper documentation is unlikely to bring them much joy or satisfaction, thus little to no time is spent writing proper documentation. This can also mean that certain software is left in that half-finished or half-usable state; it's finished enough that the developer(s) can use it for what they want, but not necessarily enough that outside users really can. This can (and does) mean that things like usability, speed, stability, UI, cooperation with other developers, and other elements suffer. I see this kind failure throughout the vast vast majority of Open Source software in the empirical sense. I also fail to see any theoretical motive/force/engine to carry products to the kind of fruition that many closed source products are known to reach.
Thirdly, the very scope of these individual projects is limited. You're including pretty much every line of code ever written for the more substantial open/free projects into this tally, but you're not looking at the number of lines of code written with a single project in mind where a great deal of cooperation and organization is required. This is, in my opinion, not terribly unlike, say, collecting counting the number of words of every term papers of every college student across the country this year and saying it costs the same amount to write as, say, the Encyclopedia Britannica because they have roughly the same number of lines. You must pay attention to the overall consistency not just the quality of its constituent parts.
Fourthly, the open/free source developers have had the benefit of riding on the heals of the closed/for-profit world. Many of the development projects are simply shadowing the features of proprietary products, little time needs to be spent on doing things like re-working the design of a UI because it fundamentally sucks. In addition, some are also motivated in an attempt to prove open/free source is capable/better because proprietary software basically rules. But what happens when open/free source is the only game in town? They no longer have anything to target or fight against. Also, the more complex of these projects surely have enjoyed the development/engineering skills of individuals that are either employed by proprietary software companies or learned their skill set with the ultimate goal of landing a job in the industry. When there's little to no money to be made developing big software, this will create a holes for open source. [Yes, I know many/most developers don't write shrink wrapped software, but proprietary software is broader than that and the skill set is still valuable]
There is nothing fundamental to copyright and patent law that prevents similar arrangments for proprietary companies. They can control the distribution of their code and certainly the use of the product using IP laws, without having to be the sole user of the code itself. There's no reason why someone like Sun couldn't license their code out for modifications.
My issue is not with openness itself. It can be a very good thing. The issue is one of control. The medical devices/technology/drug industry (which I happen to work in) still have a great deal of control over the fruits of their labor due to intellectual property laws which allow them the real possibility of actually profiting from their labors. RMS and company basically expressly forbid this kind of control so there is no real comparison.
Conversely, in the closed source world, if that same 50m dollar development cost of the product is worth just 100 dollars to 500k users then the everyone can just possibly get what they want. The closed source world both keeps people honest (e.g., pay for their fair share) and allocates resources much more efficiently.
In other words, in actuality, the open source world effectively prevents pooling of interests/resources [as much as it may claim the opposite] while closed source encourages it [even if it's done entirely out of self-interest]. Even completely ignoring other issues (e.g., profit motive) this is a deal breaker. It's simply not in the best interests for consumers on the aggregate nor it is for the developers [as they'll never be employed on projects where large scale and leverage is required].
No, I'm not advocating slavery at all. I simply assert that users presently have a choice (and a superior option) in so-called closed or non-free software. If open source developers wish to change the laws to require the open/free software, then I believe the onus should at least be on them [the advocates] to fill that void that they created by developing the software that meets the users needs and wants [even though I think it's rather impossible]. If they are are unwilling to do this, then it is unreasonable to ask in the first place.
On the other hand, if this "all free all the time" situation were to arise naturally and on its own, then I could not reasonably ask this of developers.
I'm not saying that your "choices" are incorrect or unfair in and of themselves. As long as there is real choice, as there generally is with the status quo, then I have no issue with your "choices."
However, I was making that point that many people essentially assert your view of the choices and assert that it is improper/unethical/worse/whatever to allow non-free/proprietary software to exist. In effect, they're forcing users to adopt the "choices" that you have laid out. In the open/free software world, the end user gets little to no independent influence (as a distinction from what the developer(s) themselves want) over the product. If the only game in town is open/free software, then "put up or shutup" (your choice) is all that is offered. This is what I take issue with but I'm not saying that you are necessarily guilty of it.
There are a number of people that would do away with proprietary software if it were up to them. Yet many of these same people also take the same attitude that you're taking, that no one has the the right to complain about free/open source software? Well who exactly do users complain to in a purely Open Source world? Who makes sure that their needs are met? No one really.
If there's real choice, then I can understand and appreciate your position. But if you're one that advocates removing choice from the customer (like RMS), then you better at least be responsive to the needs of the (potential) users.
Firstly, even if he does nothing wrong, it's still possible to get sued for big bucks. This is especially true if he has any worthwhile assets, such as a house, outside of his actual business. It happens more often than you think.
Secondly, even without getting sued, he is still liable for any and all debts of his business under a proprietorship. Whereas under a corporation, he would generally not be.
Thirdly, if he ever wants substantial investment, the investors will likely demand that he form a corporation so that they cannot be held personally liable (for either of the above reasons).
Lastly, the particular laws and taxes can vary substantially from state to state. I would not be so quick to make a recommendation, especially without having a feel for the size and the scope of his desired business.
Although I agree with you with most of your skepticism about the worth and importance of 3G, having used Blackberry (not a cell phone, I know) I must say that I find it _very_ nice. It's not a "thumb" keyboard, not "real", but still quite effective and painless. I can write 30+ wpm comfortably, enough to make the service very worthwhile in my opinion. I suspect I might find the Handspring Treo to be equally useful and in a better configuration (e.g., fewer devices).
Of course, none of this requires 3G. However, I do think that having the ability to get at least a 56k connection _reliably_ has a great deal of potential. Much past that point I do not see any obvious utility other than perhaps for mobile laptops, certainly not enough to justify spending inordinantly more for 2-3G level service.
I'm not an expert on his other inventions/innovations, but from what I've seen of his intellectual property myself and from what I've heard from other engineers/entrepreneurs, of whom i have a great deal of respect for, that I know inside and outside of the medical devices industry (his primary field) they're not either. I don't mean to dump on Kamen, but I would hardly say the potential of the Segway (IT) follows from his track record.
Actually truth be told I think his wheelchair-like device has the greatest potential if his design can be manufactured, produced, maintained, etc. properly.