Network was certainly the most successful of the so-called PC Networking companies, IBM had smaller-scale networking available as early as 1983 (http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/timothyd evans/intro.htm#History)
Novell was the 800 pound gorilla of networks in those days, they weren't the first, they were simply the best.
And what killed them in the end was three things:
1) Novell was a really really excellent file sharing system right around the time that people realized the PC networks meant more than sharing files. Novell's answer was a disaster in the form of....
2) Netware 4. It wasn't completely compatible with Netware 3, and it was immensely complicated. It was complicated because everybody kept telling Novell they needed an "enterprise strategy".
3) A rigid licensing scheme that made sure Novell wasn't going to get screwed by their customers (sir, you only bought a 100 person license, it simply won't work with the 101st person until you get a reseller to sell you a new license. No sire, I don't really care that your CIO is screaming to get things taken care of right now).
So what really happened?
Novell's Netware 2 & 3 were wildly popular because they were SIMPLE. They were dead reliable, easy to set up so consultants setting up small offices loved it.
Meanwhile, Novell 4 came out and the movement towards Novell Certification was on in earnest (see kids, MS did NOT invent the MSCE...Novell thought of that 5 years before MS). They pushed to get a complicated OS installed only by "certified professionals" which had a short term boost in profits, but at the expense of alienating their core consultants who could install the thing very easily and without a hokey Novell certified diploma.
Meanwhile, MS finished Windows NT. And in terms of file sharing, it wasn't so good. But it could run a DBMS (SQL Server), and get this....the license was FREE. You bought the server software and all the clients you wanted were free.
What's more, Windows NT was pretty easy to setup. Just like Netware 2 & 3. And MS hadn't yet gotten the certification bug, so Novell lost their hidden salesforce, the small time consultant virtually overnight.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Novell paid big money for two product they would later give away: UNIX (they paid almost $1B) and Wordperfect for about 2/3's as much.
Smart right? Wrong. Linux was just getting started, and the paying market for low-end UNIX was about to disappear. Meanwhile, Wordperfect missed the MS Windows boat completely and was about to sink into nothingness.
So you had Novell spending drunkenly in an attempt to become an "Enterprise Player" meanwhile screwing their most loyal people, the consultants installing Novell. Meanwhile, MS started giving away Windows NT -- they even came up with a Novell Module that would let you do a basic conversion of Novell clients to NT easily.
Today, Novell is pushing an enterprise directory structure in a time when the world wants a completely open LDAP solution and...
No need to go on with this. Novell is a classic case of a business not understanding their market and basically throwing away a huge lead in technology. A shame, really.
A lot more companies are probably going to be switching to AIM (and similar) to conduct business to avoid a lot of this mess.
Something that allows you to communicate, but without keeping records. No evidence, no worry, I suspect will be a requirement for future messaging systems.
After working with the registry for even a little while, its obvious MS wanted to consolidate the large amount of.ini files from apps and the OS, but in my opinion, they had something far more important in mind:
The registry is a place to hide information.
Also, its in a proprietary format, so you can't use any kinds of standard tools to work on it. And the tools for backup and recovery and arcane.
There's no reason the registry couldn't have been a flat file, but I believe the intent was to make it obscure, access problematic, and generally give it an air of "caution, touch the registry and you have to reinstall windows".
"I don't fully understand why Intel dropped RDRAM in the first place"
I think the reasons were pretty clear:
1) RDRAM was extremely expensive compared with SDRAM
2) The performance advantages were (and are) largely theoretical in desktop PC's
3) DDR RAM in practice showed itself to be faster than RAMBUS.
4) The Athlon chipsets supporting SDR/DDR combined with the cheaper costs of the AMD CPU and DDR RAM gave AMD based machines a huge cost advantage to vendors who chose to go the AMD route
[In fact, i would've bought a Dell last year except they only had P4's with RDRAM. That made a Dell computer not only slower, but more expensive than the Micron PC with the Athlon that I eventually bought. The price difference was significant, too]
I like the idea of something like MAPS-RBL, but I think many of them are bad hacks put together by guys who take the spam thing as a holy crusade. I don't really have a problem with that, its a free country, you do what you want.
However I fault ISPs for using them without understanding their policies. Many ISPs use these small-time black-holes because they don't want to use MAPRBL (I assume its a money thing at this point). And if you get listed, how do you know that you're listed? You don't until somebody calls somebody and says "I can't get mail through to you". There needs to be a better way.
And some sites, its not worth getting delisted. "www.joes.antispam.site.com" isn't worth the effort one way or the other.
I think the editorial is right now, but I don't see its anything different or detailed than what we've arguing about on here for years.
It seems to be a religious debate at this point. Either you support the idea that people should be able to share books, musics and other entertainment or you don't.
But please, lets stop calling it "intellectual property". The phrase is an oxymoron.
"I think being able to own ideas is a *good* thing. "
Sure, if you're a corporate megagiant. Otherwise, the ownership of ideas (which is pretty revolutionary...patents don't cover ideas) is essentially a way to set up a feudal guild system.
If you're big and can hire a lot of ideas, then you own the world. If you're an inventor in a garage, you're screwed.
Note:
"I'm sorry Mr. Woz, Mr. Jobs, but IBM thought of the idea of a small computer hooked to a television first and you can't make that. Sorry, but the PC revolution will have to wait until IBM decides it will happen".
Do you get why its a bad thing you're suggesting now?
"Now zoom back to the Kmart cd, it said I cannot open it and return. What's the difference here folks? "
This is a straw man argument.
What MS's EULA's say is that if you want to sell the bundled software *you can't*. That is, the EULA says the software is an integral part of the hardware.
Lets push that aside and use an example. You want to buy a Dateway 2000 computer but it has MS Office bundled with it. Great. You already own a copy. So you don't need the copy of MS Office.
Dateway won't sell it without the MS Office.
What should you do?
1) Refuse to buy the computer - maybe. But the price is okay, and you really want a Dateway.
2) Buy the computer, and install the 2nd copy on your laptop - great idea except for one thing. The EULA says it belongs to a different computer. That seems silly right? You don't want to be a "law breaker" so you go with...
3) Buy the computer, and sell the new copy of office to your buddy for $50 - great, except this is the same as #2 above.
#2 and #3 don't make sense from anybody's viewpoint except MS's. They sold me a copy, and I can do with it whatever I want as long as I'm not violating the copyright. #2 & #3 don't violate a copyright, but they violate the EULA.
What the court appears to be saying is that when you buy software, you can treat it like a Music CD, or a book. MS may not like that use, but nonetheless it makes sense to treat software like a book.
I'm not a recruiter, but at an old company I worked for (and this is old), they had requirements like COBOL, IMS, JCL and a laundry list.
Personnel went through the resumes first (there was no HR in those days), and looked for those items on the first page. If they weren't there, then the resume got the typical "thanks very much, we'll keep it on file" letter.
The lesson I took was to make sure the intials they were looking for jumped out. Whether you do that in the typical laundry list or in a list of accomplishments is besides the point.
But you've got to get your skill set out there, and quickly.
"Using something like my ReplayTV has totally revolutionized how I watch TV."
You guys say that, and I like the technology, the trouble is, I've gone 2 weeks without watching any broadcast TV. I've gone 2 years without taping a show from television.
I've rented some DVD's (3), but that's about it.
Every sitcom I've watched lately is awful, the latest star trek is unwatchable and X-files is not at all compelling anymore.
So what content are you guys finding that's worth the time or effort to tape?
"And we, the viewers, have no right to free television"
That's arguable.
Broadcast TV is free because the spectrum used by the TV channels are considered public property. Since the TV stations don't pay for those frequencies directly, they pay by providing the entertainment for free to anyone who owns a TV receiver.
Now cable is different, but cable isn't the issue here, not really.
So I think you argue that we do have a right to free TV.
An interesting thing that I've learned...the chemicals are the least expensive part of running a pool. The most expensive part (aside from equipment repairs) is the cost of electricity to run pumps. That adds about $40-60 a month in the summer.
In my experience, people who say this are intolerent to bad pH balance or chloramines. I've had people tell me that "they can't tolerate chlorine", and tell me my pool hardly has any chlorine.
The truth is, I keep my pool chlorine levels relatively high. The trick is proper pH balance.
Incidentally, I don't have any experience with Bacquil, but the people who I know that use it, I never like the clarity of the water.
That's not a knock on anything, everybody keeps their pool the way they like it; we've been happy with chlorine (in fact, I had the ozone generator removed because I'm convinced residential ozone generators are useless).
The problem with this system is that its automating something that is more easily handled by cheap mechanical devices. Mechanical autochlorinator technology is cheap and works.
Most people think a pool with too much chlorine will have a "chlorine" smell and will irritate your eyes. This is a fallacy; pools get that funny smell because the available chlorine has been turned to chloramines. The only way to get rid of the chloramines is to add more chlorine. So ironically, a "chlorine" smell in a pool is a sign of poor maintence and NOT ENOUGH CHLORINE! Your eyes will not be irritated, your skin won't turn red, you won't be harmed by too much chlorine in a pool.
Besides this is attacking the wrong problem. Keeping the proper chlorine levels in a pool with the proper chemistry is simple. Combined with the mechnical device I've already mentioned makes checking the chlorine levels a once-a-week chore for a residential pool. Its the least bothersome part of running a pool.
The tricky part is the rest of the chemistry (particularly total alkalinity and pH). It can be done via automation, but there's no particular need to have a computer do it. Again, its a once-a-week check, and then you add small doses of chemicals at that time if it needs to be balanced. But the balance is critical to everything about the pool and the health of the people in it.
The bottom line is that you have to check it once a week yourself anyway, regardless of the automation system. Spend your time swimming, not inventing the equivalent of an electric dog polisher.
"You pay via the constant innteruptions (aka adverts), cable bill, licence fee, the guide that tells you what's on etc."
Again, getting back to my free 15 channels, yes, I deal with constant interruptiosn, but it doesn't include (a) cable bill (b) license fee, (c) guide because:
(a) There is no cable bill for broadcast TV
(b) In the US is there is no license fee
(c) guides are given out free with the Sunday newspaper.
If you step up to cable, you certainly have the cable bill, but again, no license fee, and the guides are free online (www.gist.com/tv and about a dozen others).
I guess I just value "entertainment" far less than other people, because I think for HDTV, I'd probably be willing to pay $4/24 hours at most (which is about 2 and 50 for you).
Slashdot Mirror
Network was certainly the most successful of the so-called PC Networking companies, IBM had smaller-scale networking available as early as 1983 (http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/timothyd evans/intro.htm#History)
Novell was the 800 pound gorilla of networks in those days, they weren't the first, they were simply the best.
And what killed them in the end was three things:
1) Novell was a really really excellent file sharing system right around the time that people realized the PC networks meant more than sharing files. Novell's answer was a disaster in the form of....
2) Netware 4. It wasn't completely compatible with Netware 3, and it was immensely complicated. It was complicated because everybody kept telling Novell they needed an "enterprise strategy".
3) A rigid licensing scheme that made sure Novell wasn't going to get screwed by their customers (sir, you only bought a 100 person license, it simply won't work with the 101st person until you get a reseller to sell you a new license. No sire, I don't really care that your CIO is screaming to get things taken care of right now).
So what really happened?
Novell's Netware 2 & 3 were wildly popular because they were SIMPLE. They were dead reliable, easy to set up so consultants setting up small offices loved it.
Meanwhile, Novell 4 came out and the movement towards Novell Certification was on in earnest (see kids, MS did NOT invent the MSCE...Novell thought of that 5 years before MS). They pushed to get a complicated OS installed only by "certified professionals" which had a short term boost in profits, but at the expense of alienating their core consultants who could install the thing very easily and without a hokey Novell certified diploma.
Meanwhile, MS finished Windows NT. And in terms of file sharing, it wasn't so good. But it could run a DBMS (SQL Server), and get this....the license was FREE. You bought the server software and all the clients you wanted were free.
What's more, Windows NT was pretty easy to setup. Just like Netware 2 & 3. And MS hadn't yet gotten the certification bug, so Novell lost their hidden salesforce, the small time consultant virtually overnight.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Novell paid big money for two product they would later give away: UNIX (they paid almost $1B) and Wordperfect for about 2/3's as much.
Smart right? Wrong. Linux was just getting started, and the paying market for low-end UNIX was about to disappear. Meanwhile, Wordperfect missed the MS Windows boat completely and was about to sink into nothingness.
So you had Novell spending drunkenly in an attempt to become an "Enterprise Player" meanwhile screwing their most loyal people, the consultants installing Novell. Meanwhile, MS started giving away Windows NT -- they even came up with a Novell Module that would let you do a basic conversion of Novell clients to NT easily.
Today, Novell is pushing an enterprise directory structure in a time when the world wants a completely open LDAP solution and...
No need to go on with this. Novell is a classic case of a business not understanding their market and basically throwing away a huge lead in technology. A shame, really.
That wasn't my point.
Companies routinelly save email. It is monitored, recorded, and can be the basis for court action.
People CAN save IM logs, but since they're trivial to fake, they lack the same authority that email does.
Most companies do not monitor AIM conversations, and I'm not aware of AIM conversations being used as evidence in any court procedings.
A lot more companies are probably going to be switching to AIM (and similar) to conduct business to avoid a lot of this mess.
Something that allows you to communicate, but without keeping records. No evidence, no worry, I suspect will be a requirement for future messaging systems.
After working with the registry for even a little while, its obvious MS wanted to consolidate the large amount of .ini files from apps and the OS, but in my opinion, they had something far more important in mind:
The registry is a place to hide information.
Also, its in a proprietary format, so you can't use any kinds of standard tools to work on it. And the tools for backup and recovery and arcane.
There's no reason the registry couldn't have been a flat file, but I believe the intent was to make it obscure, access problematic, and generally give it an air of "caution, touch the registry and you have to reinstall windows".
Its the worst part of windows in my opinion.
Atlanta. Perhaps you've heard of it.
"I don't fully understand why Intel dropped RDRAM in the first place"
I think the reasons were pretty clear:
1) RDRAM was extremely expensive compared with SDRAM
2) The performance advantages were (and are) largely theoretical in desktop PC's
3) DDR RAM in practice showed itself to be faster than RAMBUS.
4) The Athlon chipsets supporting SDR/DDR combined with the cheaper costs of the AMD CPU and DDR RAM gave AMD based machines a huge cost advantage to vendors who chose to go the AMD route
[In fact, i would've bought a Dell last year except they only had P4's with RDRAM. That made a Dell computer not only slower, but more expensive than the Micron PC with the Athlon that I eventually bought. The price difference was significant, too]
I like the idea of something like MAPS-RBL, but I think many of them are bad hacks put together by guys who take the spam thing as a holy crusade. I don't really have a problem with that, its a free country, you do what you want.
However I fault ISPs for using them without understanding their policies. Many ISPs use these small-time black-holes because they don't want to use MAPRBL (I assume its a money thing at this point). And if you get listed, how do you know that you're listed? You don't until somebody calls somebody and says "I can't get mail through to you". There needs to be a better way.
And some sites, its not worth getting delisted. "www.joes.antispam.site.com" isn't worth the effort one way or the other.
What if you buy software, no license on the outside, and never install it.
Instead, you start poking around with the code that's on the disk.
How can a click-EULA apply then?
I'm not being sarcastic, I'm simply trying to understand the thought process behind these laws.
Taking it one step further, if I buy a program from Egghead (work with me), and click on the EULA, you can argue I agreed to something. Whatever.
Then I buy a 2nd copy of the same program. Does the EULA from the 1st copy bind me to the 2nd copy? Or are they separate transactions?
I think the editorial is right now, but I don't see its anything different or detailed than what we've arguing about on here for years.
It seems to be a religious debate at this point. Either you support the idea that people should be able to share books, musics and other entertainment or you don't.
But please, lets stop calling it "intellectual property". The phrase is an oxymoron.
Not all of the DC area was set up to use the proxy. N. Va. seemed to be using it, but Montgomery County didn't.
Good point.
If everybody has my personal information, it isn't very private anymore.
If everybody has my personal information its public information.
Information that is known by everyone isn't worth anything.
"I think being able to own ideas is a *good* thing. "
Sure, if you're a corporate megagiant. Otherwise, the ownership of ideas (which is pretty revolutionary...patents don't cover ideas) is essentially a way to set up a feudal guild system.
If you're big and can hire a lot of ideas, then you own the world. If you're an inventor in a garage, you're screwed.
Note:
"I'm sorry Mr. Woz, Mr. Jobs, but IBM thought of the idea of a small computer hooked to a television first and you can't make that. Sorry, but the PC revolution will have to wait until IBM decides it will happen".
Do you get why its a bad thing you're suggesting now?
Don't be such a whiner. Its just a hot, furry pussy.
"Yet the bee's highly sophisticated behavior is extremely robust and efficient."
Really? Isn't it more a case where there are so many bees that if one breaks down it doesn't matter?
Perhaps we're going about reliability the wrong way.
"Now zoom back to the Kmart cd, it said I cannot open it and return. What's the difference here folks? "
This is a straw man argument.
What MS's EULA's say is that if you want to sell the bundled software *you can't*. That is, the EULA says the software is an integral part of the hardware.
Lets push that aside and use an example. You want to buy a Dateway 2000 computer but it has MS Office bundled with it. Great. You already own a copy. So you don't need the copy of MS Office.
Dateway won't sell it without the MS Office.
What should you do?
1) Refuse to buy the computer - maybe. But the price is okay, and you really want a Dateway.
2) Buy the computer, and install the 2nd copy on your laptop - great idea except for one thing. The EULA says it belongs to a different computer. That seems silly right? You don't want to be a "law breaker" so you go with...
3) Buy the computer, and sell the new copy of office to your buddy for $50 - great, except this is the same as #2 above.
#2 and #3 don't make sense from anybody's viewpoint except MS's. They sold me a copy, and I can do with it whatever I want as long as I'm not violating the copyright. #2 & #3 don't violate a copyright, but they violate the EULA.
What the court appears to be saying is that when you buy software, you can treat it like a Music CD, or a book. MS may not like that use, but nonetheless it makes sense to treat software like a book.
I'm not a recruiter, but at an old company I worked for (and this is old), they had requirements like COBOL, IMS, JCL and a laundry list.
Personnel went through the resumes first (there was no HR in those days), and looked for those items on the first page. If they weren't there, then the resume got the typical "thanks very much, we'll keep it on file" letter.
The lesson I took was to make sure the intials they were looking for jumped out. Whether you do that in the typical laundry list or in a list of accomplishments is besides the point.
But you've got to get your skill set out there, and quickly.
"Using something like my ReplayTV has totally revolutionized how I watch TV."
You guys say that, and I like the technology, the trouble is, I've gone 2 weeks without watching any broadcast TV. I've gone 2 years without taping a show from television.
I've rented some DVD's (3), but that's about it.
Every sitcom I've watched lately is awful, the latest star trek is unwatchable and X-files is not at all compelling anymore.
So what content are you guys finding that's worth the time or effort to tape?
"And we, the viewers, have no right to free television"
That's arguable.
Broadcast TV is free because the spectrum used by the TV channels are considered public property. Since the TV stations don't pay for those frequencies directly, they pay by providing the entertainment for free to anyone who owns a TV receiver.
Now cable is different, but cable isn't the issue here, not really.
So I think you argue that we do have a right to free TV.
Actually yes. Most of the big ecommerce sites are java based.
An interesting thing that I've learned...the chemicals are the least expensive part of running a pool. The most expensive part (aside from equipment repairs) is the cost of electricity to run pumps. That adds about $40-60 a month in the summer.
In my experience, people who say this are intolerent to bad pH balance or chloramines. I've had people tell me that "they can't tolerate chlorine", and tell me my pool hardly has any chlorine.
The truth is, I keep my pool chlorine levels relatively high. The trick is proper pH balance.
Incidentally, I don't have any experience with Bacquil, but the people who I know that use it, I never like the clarity of the water.
That's not a knock on anything, everybody keeps their pool the way they like it; we've been happy with chlorine (in fact, I had the ozone generator removed because I'm convinced residential ozone generators are useless).
Pool season in only 3 1/2 months. Can't wait.
The problem with this system is that its automating something that is more easily handled by cheap mechanical devices. Mechanical autochlorinator technology is cheap and works.
Most people think a pool with too much chlorine will have a "chlorine" smell and will irritate your eyes. This is a fallacy; pools get that funny smell because the available chlorine has been turned to chloramines. The only way to get rid of the chloramines is to add more chlorine. So ironically, a "chlorine" smell in a pool is a sign of poor maintence and NOT ENOUGH CHLORINE! Your eyes will not be irritated, your skin won't turn red, you won't be harmed by too much chlorine in a pool.
Besides this is attacking the wrong problem. Keeping the proper chlorine levels in a pool with the proper chemistry is simple. Combined with the mechnical device I've already mentioned makes checking the chlorine levels a once-a-week chore for a residential pool. Its the least bothersome part of running a pool.
The tricky part is the rest of the chemistry (particularly total alkalinity and pH). It can be done via automation, but there's no particular need to have a computer do it. Again, its a once-a-week check, and then you add small doses of chemicals at that time if it needs to be balanced. But the balance is critical to everything about the pool and the health of the people in it.
The bottom line is that you have to check it once a week yourself anyway, regardless of the automation system. Spend your time swimming, not inventing the equivalent of an electric dog polisher.
"but when they are available, what honest justification is there to support the ones that override copy protection? "
How about this justification:
"When I buy a piece of hardware, its mine to do with as I want"
"Remember when Harlan Ellison was *GOOD?* "
Frankly, no.
"You pay via the constant innteruptions (aka adverts), cable bill, licence fee, the guide that tells you what's on etc."
Again, getting back to my free 15 channels, yes, I deal with constant interruptiosn, but it doesn't include (a) cable bill (b) license fee, (c) guide because:
(a) There is no cable bill for broadcast TV
(b) In the US is there is no license fee
(c) guides are given out free with the Sunday newspaper.
If you step up to cable, you certainly have the cable bill, but again, no license fee, and the guides are free online (www.gist.com/tv and about a dozen others).
I guess I just value "entertainment" far less than other people, because I think for HDTV, I'd probably be willing to pay $4/24 hours at most (which is about 2 and 50 for you).