Everytime a sparrow shits the weather changes a little bit so it would seem obvious to me that when you clump massive changes together you'll get a domino effect. Is this anything to worry about? Hardly. The idea that we as humans shouldn't change the world is foolish. All other species change the world and so do we. We just happen to be better at it. Not that it isn't a good idea to protect the enviroment and such but we shouldn't try to keep things the same. That just defeats the point of evolution. So we should learn from our mistakes but we shouldn't go nuts trying to freeze time. What do they want us to do, build a green strip between every building so that the average city is 1000 miles wide? That'd just cause more gasoline to be burned causing even worse effects.
Kill domain names, use public keys..
on
Pirate DNS?
·
· Score: 2
The domain name system is about dead. So many hose beasts have bought up all the good names and aren't even using them and you have all that fighting over new TLD's as if they really even matter. The majority of people I've watched don't even understand domain names and URL's. They go to the search engine default of their browser and click'n'search from there or find sites out of their bookmarks.
Would be an interesting experiment to create a distributed system that used encryption keys to lookup the IP of the machine. This encryption code could be either for the machine itself or for a certain user on that machine. Once you located the machine you wanted to talk to you could send your public key to it encrypted by it's public key and then carry on secure communications from there. By this system even if you knew the machines IP you couldn't talk to it unless you also knew it's key. I'm sure it'd need a lot of ironing out but it might fix some of the problems and prepare for a Net that is much less centrally controlled such as peer-peer wireless internetworking.
I hated the fact that my parents, friends, and family all had free access to my skills. As a teen I lived in a small town where everyone knows everyone so making any money under this system was practically impossible. To make money I had to offer my services to a company in a whole other country which I worked for over the Internet. Then my parents just thought I was insane and wondered why I kept getting checks when all I ever did was sit at the computer and play. LOL and kept urging me to go find a real job like working at Taco Bell.
I think this article partly misses the point. Eventually this generation will become parents and they will be more technically elite than their parents and will most likely, by need, be fairly up-to-date with technology. This will mean that the parents will be as elite as their children. Also computers are opening up the possibility of working fewer hours at the office and more at home. This will give parents more precense in their childrens life. The real change will be that younger people will be well educated and mature. I think we'll probably see the legal age moving from 18/21 down closer to 15 within a generation or two. When the 15yo's have enough money and media savvy to influence politics it'll happen.
When in doubt use a different register? Several of the alt's are cheaper anyway. You can't force their hand but you can ask about policies such as this before picking who to register through.
I could see a well documented and short waiting period after a domain expires before it was open to the public but anything over a month would be extreme I think. If someone hasn't noticed it's down by then well then I guess their site isn't very important to them.:) A good admin would update BEFORE the time limit was up anyway. The grace period would be just 'it got lost in the mail' forgiveness. The owner should be able to reregister through any of the competition also though.
If any regulation is done at all it should be for disallowing the use of any signal over more than x distance.. probably a distance within 100ft in cities and other populated areas and further in low population areas. Nobody should be able to own any of the spectrum. It belongs to all of us. Corporations that buy it up and send their signals over a long range are wasting what belongs to the public. We need a massive peer-peer wireless network using multiple short hopes to pass signals rather than the couple big hopes approach used by the corporate/government owned Internet model. Once we start working on the problem I'm sure there is little limit to the amount of bandwidth. Some of it may be hard to access or use in this way currently but look what we have done with CPU's once we really tried.:)
It is sciences job to not take any ethical view on issues. Of course this isn't possible but it is the goal to work towards. See what can be done and then you can gain the objectivity needed to decide what should be done. You can't be objective until you've already passed through the hype and unknown factors. If we start making laws to limit what can be done with this technology we open up the law to control all the things you are afraid of. What if only those who are rich enough to bribe the politicians are allowed to design their children to be intelligent and healthy? You'd be opening up a class war that'd be impossible to win. I'd be scared to death of having the majority rules on such an issue. All those people who watch day time tv and read tabloids and censor children from the Internet getting decide what kind of child I can have? No thank you! With every new technology there is a time of painful adjustment, mistakes are made and we learn from it. That is the only true way to really learn any lesson. Genetics is not the ultimate power, there is always something even more impressive on the horizon. For genetics that horizon is probably nanotech.. after that who knows?
I wasn't actually meaning to exclude Flash as I do recall them opensourcing it (and PHP even ahs some support I think) but I think that the majority of plug-in's are nasty and a pain to both the developer and the user. Myself I don't use sites that require plugins and as a developer I don't create such sites. If a technology is interesting enough it can be made a standard and be intergrated into any standardized browser. That's the way it should be. I think browsers should have to comply with gully supporting a list of standards to be able to use a certain version number. ie instead of saying HTML4 + CSS2 + DOM you could just say WWW4 or something. Make it easy for consumers to see which browser was best.
While I agree Flash is more annoying than useful I have no doubt somebody has found a good use for it. Afterall Hushmail actually found a use for Java that seems to actually do something you couldn't do easily without Java. On the other hand I'm against maintaining a plugin interface as it allows lazy plugin creators to create plugins that are OS-specific. Mozilla should provide some sort of cross-platform programming language (even Java if used correctly would work) for implementing such things. The whole point is to make it so we can make web-sites that work equally across all platforms and nothing that won't follow our rules should be allowed. They can always take the Mozilla source and hack their own interface if they really want to. That's soon lead to major problems for companies I think.:) Better yet find all the most used plug-in's (Netscape doubtless keeps records from their searches) and create opensource cross-platform versions of each. Maybe that's what will happen. If so then great.:) The idea of a Flash/Beatnik enabled skin scares me though. On the other hand it might be interesting to use a live video stream into the spot currently held by the Mozilla logo.:)
Actually I've been thinking this would be a good way for opensource companies to support opensource programmers. Offer anybody that contributes on a somewhat regular basis to any project that interests that company and they'll give you a free place to live (with free net connection of course). In Miami they have some great gated communites and it'd be awesome to be able to go hang out at the pool with other developers and their families. If I didn't have to pay rent it'd be a lot easier to donate my time and being around my codevelopers in real space would make it easier to plan certain things. I've even priced such communites that were up for sell and the price isn't anywhere as high as you'd think. I'm ready to live in my RedHat community now. Reminds you sort of like Snow Crash & The Diamond Age eh?
I'd agree that open or closed source has little to do with trusted or not trusted. Either open or closed source software can follow strict design guidelines or be flakey. With closed source we get what a company wants to sell us and no way to prove if it is or isn't what we want. With opened source it's exactly what we want it to be. If that means trusted then it'll be trusted because otherwise what would be the point of coding it? The bottomline is that we are in control of our destiny.
I always figured KDE and Gnome would over time merge and then each become more like a differently oriented distribution of the same code tree. While this isn't quite that far yet it is a good proof as to why opensource is better than commercial. Here's forking for ya baby, in reverse.. you fork and we merge.:) These guys rock. I love KDE and Gnome both and in fact use both on a daily basis.:)
Dunno. I can't think of hearing it w/ the future part tacked on from anyone else so maybe it came from my head or maybe I'm just tired and can't remember. Do you think I can patent it? LOL
Those who ignore the past are doomed to repeat it, those who ignore the future are just doomed. Sure it may seem like a total waste of time and money to watch and explore space but most discoveries are made when you are least expecting them. If you aren't paying attention then it might blow past you and you'll never realize what you missed. There will come a point when this planet will be destroyed, either by our own foolishness or by some outside force. If we haven't colonized space by then then poof the human race is gone. Remember all those asteroid movies a couple years ago?:) Don't put all your eggs in one basket, sure another basket might cost more but it provides you extra protection. Just imagine life as needing RAID protection.:)
Hrm.. if we have that whole range of easy to see signals blocked off so we can see any lil green men sending in that range I guess we're not sending anything out at that range. What if the lil green men decided that this was an optimal range to watch also so they aren't sending anything out either. We're each sitting behind a one-way mirror trying to see the other but evidently only seeing the blank reflection of our own window.:)
I use a simple spider program to search the web and usenet for information that might be of use to me. Daily it sucks in a couple hundred megs of mostly useless data that is further sorted and searched by a backend program. If I wanted to grab illegal information I could just cause the spider to have a wider range that would find that information but without making it look as if I were looking for it. Obviously since my spider'd information never gets shown to anyone else I'm not responsible for others receiving this information and since it's automated and along the same lines as programs that generate search engines which are common online it'd be rather difficult to place any legal blame on me for receiving such data. My basic point being is that all the positives mentioned for the use of pads can be acheived just by playing dumb and using already existant technology so why bother? I'm sure there are as many ways to hide messages as there are children who like to play at spy games. It'd be more useful IMO to just push for more encryption when sending data over the Internet and more systems like freenet.
After reading through this whole list of discusion there were only a handful of people who sounded like they even had any idea what they were talking about. That is my only guess as to why this topic was so spammed.
Okay so MNG isn't widely supported yet, that problem is fixed one application at a time isn't it? I've actually been using it for quite some time and think highly of the format.
PNG isn't widely supported yet? Not as widely supported as GIF or JPEG but I'm seeing it more and more often. Maybe it is more popular among the geek crowd than among graphic artist but it's starting to spread across the web and is supported in most graphic manipulation and viewing programs I've seen.
Internet Explorer, Photoshop, whatever can't use it.. I refer you back to answer #1. Support comes one app at a time. If you want your favorite app to support it too then tell them so.
Mozilla should be working on other things? Mozilla is an open project and people can contribute whatever they are interested in to the cause. MNG is a highly requested feature. If you want something else worked on then either do it yourself or fund someone else to do it.
PNG/MNG aren't good enough? Again if you don't like the way things are then improve upon it, fund someone else to improve upon it, or convince the patent holder of your favorite standard to make it free. Or just go on paying stupid fees if you want.
Mozilla has a dumb logo? What the shit does that have to do with MNG in Mozilla? Make a skin for it that has whatever logo you like.
Your favorite porn site doesn't use PNG/MNG so it must not be a real image format? Maybe they're to busy masturbating over their own models to think about saving their images in a better format. Get a life and get laid and stop wanking to porn sites.
Okay for people who have trouble with basic comprehension or just happened to be reading that while they were tired or distracted..
A.) they're to lazy B.) they're to dumb C.) they don't want to
Now it's seem to me your argument falls into C. Of course it could sort of fall into A and B also the way you worded it. If it was well coded, even as well coded as an average opensource project, then they should be able to easily port it to other systems. You must agree that any mindshare gained on competing systems is worth at least this minimum amount of work to compile it for another system. So either they just are to lazy to make that small effort or they are such bad programmers that it'd take a lot of work to port over.. or the upper management is to stupid to see the benefit of gaining mindshare within the camp of prehaps the greatest competitor they've had for years.
Just look at M$'s website sometime and you'll see that IE5 exists for both Solaris and HP-UX already. I dunno about you but usually when I want to compile most Unix apps they'll compile on anything that has gcc ported to it and isn't a totally dead platform. If Microsoft isn't porting IE to FreeBSD, Linux, and other Unix-based OS's it's because A.) they're to lazy B.) they are to dumb C.) they don't want to. I'm all for M$ products being ported over to give opensource apps some competition (though I'd never use any none opensourced apps if opensourced counterparts existed) but it seems to me Microsoft isn't going to be doing that for quite some time. I'll let you decide which of the above reasons is holding them back.
Transmeta is forcing Intel to work on the power consumption issues they would have otherwise ignored. AMD is forcing them to keep making their CPU's faster. A few years ago I would have said Intel was a monopoly but in these recent years they are having to work to stay king of the mountain and this is good. We get better products at a better price. Ten years ago the concept of a 1Ghz CPU that ran at 2 watts of power would have seemed impossible but now it's becoming a reality. Now if we could just find a CPU-maker who would figure out a way to make the darned things much cheaper we could really start a performance/price war.:)
This is where marketing comes in. Create an image of high quality and top notch support so the suits feel like their job won't be at risk if they buy 1000 Transmeta powered laptops rather than Intel powered. Make the price and speed comparable and beat them good with power consumption. This gives them a hook. Then create a bonus program for sales agents (often called spiffs) at various big suppliers so that they make more for pushing Transmeta powered products. AMD has used this to great success as have almost every other computer product that lives past it's first year or two. It doesn't matter which is better, it matters which the customer wants to buy and that depends on which the sales person pitches as being the best. Competition is great for consumers, it brings new choices and better quality and price. It is good for sales people because it lines their pockets.:)
As someone who has done a lot of sales jobs to fund my own programming/engineering projects.:)
As we switch over from the AOL/Time-Warner model of the Internet to really equalized peer-peer Internet we'll probably see the web, and the rest of the Internet moving to a model more like the Napster model where people share between themselves. I remember when the web was new and it was like that, just lots of high quality personal and educational sites. Then banner ads and spam mailers came and tried to impose their centralized corporate Spamnet on us. Now that they've seen that most people aren't interested they'll hopefully continue the current trend of backing off on the banners and spam. Large sites will probably be community projects with sponsors for the more expensive things they might need. There will still be online stores and various other ways to make money online but finally the Internet will lose some of it's Los Vegas neon lights selling everything from Coca-Cola to used panties. People who want to sell online with spam, ad banners, subscriptions, micro-payments, and whatever else are kidding themselves if they think they are going to make a fortune. Sure you can fill niche markets that way but given a choice between free/spamless and expensive/spam people are going to choose the first almost always. Call that Shoppers Psychology 101.. people like cheap and they don't like to be bothered.
I believe that Crusoe's software is all below the OS level. To the OS it's just another x86 processor so any software that runs on Intel x86 should run on a Crusoe processor also.
Also they've said they won't be using the CPU at it's own instruction-set level both because it'd defeat the purpose of code-morphing software and also because the processor is designed specificly to be run by a code-morpher and isn't appropiate to use without the code-morphing layer. Important features of a CPU are left to the code-morphing layer. Transmeta's version of Linux, to my understanding, is just a normal lite version of x86 Linux w/ a few extra's thrown in (all which are still open so don't worry).
I'd think they'd only have to pay an OEM price to the Linux distro if the distro itself was going to handle support. It'd be impossible for the distro to charge a per-seat price if they weren't offering some additional service above what you get from a free download of the software.
As far as the Microsoft tax goes, many OEM's actually have to pay more to Microsoft if they don't include Windows on the machines. Though after thinking it over this may be a winning plan, I'd gladly pay money not to have Windows on my machine. Anyone else willing to send Microsoft $50/yr not to write software or otherwise interfere with decent computers everywhere?:)
Slashdot Mirror
Everytime a sparrow shits the weather changes a little bit so it would seem obvious to me that when you clump massive changes together you'll get a domino effect. Is this anything to worry about? Hardly. The idea that we as humans shouldn't change the world is foolish. All other species change the world and so do we. We just happen to be better at it. Not that it isn't a good idea to protect the enviroment and such but we shouldn't try to keep things the same. That just defeats the point of evolution. So we should learn from our mistakes but we shouldn't go nuts trying to freeze time. What do they want us to do, build a green strip between every building so that the average city is 1000 miles wide? That'd just cause more gasoline to be burned causing even worse effects.
The domain name system is about dead. So many hose beasts have bought up all the good names and aren't even using them and you have all that fighting over new TLD's as if they really even matter. The majority of people I've watched don't even understand domain names and URL's. They go to the search engine default of their browser and click'n'search from there or find sites out of their bookmarks.
Would be an interesting experiment to create a distributed system that used encryption keys to lookup the IP of the machine. This encryption code could be either for the machine itself or for a certain user on that machine. Once you located the machine you wanted to talk to you could send your public key to it encrypted by it's public key and then carry on secure communications from there. By this system even if you knew the machines IP you couldn't talk to it unless you also knew it's key. I'm sure it'd need a lot of ironing out but it might fix some of the problems and prepare for a Net that is much less centrally controlled such as peer-peer wireless internetworking.
I hated the fact that my parents, friends, and family all had free access to my skills. As a teen I lived in a small town where everyone knows everyone so making any money under this system was practically impossible. To make money I had to offer my services to a company in a whole other country which I worked for over the Internet. Then my parents just thought I was insane and wondered why I kept getting checks when all I ever did was sit at the computer and play. LOL and kept urging me to go find a real job like working at Taco Bell.
I think this article partly misses the point. Eventually this generation will become parents and they will be more technically elite than their parents and will most likely, by need, be fairly up-to-date with technology. This will mean that the parents will be as elite as their children. Also computers are opening up the possibility of working fewer hours at the office and more at home. This will give parents more precense in their childrens life. The real change will be that younger people will be well educated and mature. I think we'll probably see the legal age moving from 18/21 down closer to 15 within a generation or two. When the 15yo's have enough money and media savvy to influence politics it'll happen.
When in doubt use a different register? Several of the alt's are cheaper anyway. You can't force their hand but you can ask about policies such as this before picking who to register through.
:) A good admin would update BEFORE the time limit was up anyway. The grace period would be just 'it got lost in the mail' forgiveness. The owner should be able to reregister through any of the competition also though.
I could see a well documented and short waiting period after a domain expires before it was open to the public but anything over a month would be extreme I think. If someone hasn't noticed it's down by then well then I guess their site isn't very important to them.
If any regulation is done at all it should be for disallowing the use of any signal over more than x distance.. probably a distance within 100ft in cities and other populated areas and further in low population areas. Nobody should be able to own any of the spectrum. It belongs to all of us. Corporations that buy it up and send their signals over a long range are wasting what belongs to the public. We need a massive peer-peer wireless network using multiple short hopes to pass signals rather than the couple big hopes approach used by the corporate/government owned Internet model. Once we start working on the problem I'm sure there is little limit to the amount of bandwidth. Some of it may be hard to access or use in this way currently but look what we have done with CPU's once we really tried. :)
It is sciences job to not take any ethical view on issues. Of course this isn't possible but it is the goal to work towards. See what can be done and then you can gain the objectivity needed to decide what should be done. You can't be objective until you've already passed through the hype and unknown factors. If we start making laws to limit what can be done with this technology we open up the law to control all the things you are afraid of. What if only those who are rich enough to bribe the politicians are allowed to design their children to be intelligent and healthy? You'd be opening up a class war that'd be impossible to win. I'd be scared to death of having the majority rules on such an issue. All those people who watch day time tv and read tabloids and censor children from the Internet getting decide what kind of child I can have? No thank you! With every new technology there is a time of painful adjustment, mistakes are made and we learn from it. That is the only true way to really learn any lesson. Genetics is not the ultimate power, there is always something even more impressive on the horizon. For genetics that horizon is probably nanotech.. after that who knows?
I have seen P500's run slower than my P100 just because it wasn't setup right. I don't think this is an issue.
I wasn't actually meaning to exclude Flash as I do recall them opensourcing it (and PHP even ahs some support I think) but I think that the majority of plug-in's are nasty and a pain to both the developer and the user. Myself I don't use sites that require plugins and as a developer I don't create such sites. If a technology is interesting enough it can be made a standard and be intergrated into any standardized browser. That's the way it should be. I think browsers should have to comply with gully supporting a list of standards to be able to use a certain version number. ie instead of saying HTML4 + CSS2 + DOM you could just say WWW4 or something. Make it easy for consumers to see which browser was best.
While I agree Flash is more annoying than useful I have no doubt somebody has found a good use for it. Afterall Hushmail actually found a use for Java that seems to actually do something you couldn't do easily without Java. On the other hand I'm against maintaining a plugin interface as it allows lazy plugin creators to create plugins that are OS-specific. Mozilla should provide some sort of cross-platform programming language (even Java if used correctly would work) for implementing such things. The whole point is to make it so we can make web-sites that work equally across all platforms and nothing that won't follow our rules should be allowed. They can always take the Mozilla source and hack their own interface if they really want to. That's soon lead to major problems for companies I think. :) Better yet find all the most used plug-in's (Netscape doubtless keeps records from their searches) and create opensource cross-platform versions of each. Maybe that's what will happen. If so then great. :) The idea of a Flash/Beatnik enabled skin scares me though. On the other hand it might be interesting to use a live video stream into the spot currently held by the Mozilla logo. :)
Actually I've been thinking this would be a good way for opensource companies to support opensource programmers. Offer anybody that contributes on a somewhat regular basis to any project that interests that company and they'll give you a free place to live (with free net connection of course). In Miami they have some great gated communites and it'd be awesome to be able to go hang out at the pool with other developers and their families. If I didn't have to pay rent it'd be a lot easier to donate my time and being around my codevelopers in real space would make it easier to plan certain things. I've even priced such communites that were up for sell and the price isn't anywhere as high as you'd think. I'm ready to live in my RedHat community now. Reminds you sort of like Snow Crash & The Diamond Age eh?
I'd agree that open or closed source has little to do with trusted or not trusted. Either open or closed source software can follow strict design guidelines or be flakey. With closed source we get what a company wants to sell us and no way to prove if it is or isn't what we want. With opened source it's exactly what we want it to be. If that means trusted then it'll be trusted because otherwise what would be the point of coding it? The bottomline is that we are in control of our destiny.
I always figured KDE and Gnome would over time merge and then each become more like a differently oriented distribution of the same code tree. While this isn't quite that far yet it is a good proof as to why opensource is better than commercial. Here's forking for ya baby, in reverse.. you fork and we merge. :) These guys rock. I love KDE and Gnome both and in fact use both on a daily basis. :)
Dunno. I can't think of hearing it w/ the future part tacked on from anyone else so maybe it came from my head or maybe I'm just tired and can't remember. Do you think I can patent it? LOL
Those who ignore the past are doomed to repeat it, those who ignore the future are just doomed. Sure it may seem like a total waste of time and money to watch and explore space but most discoveries are made when you are least expecting them. If you aren't paying attention then it might blow past you and you'll never realize what you missed. There will come a point when this planet will be destroyed, either by our own foolishness or by some outside force. If we haven't colonized space by then then poof the human race is gone. Remember all those asteroid movies a couple years ago? :) Don't put all your eggs in one basket, sure another basket might cost more but it provides you extra protection. Just imagine life as needing RAID protection. :)
Hrm.. if we have that whole range of easy to see signals blocked off so we can see any lil green men sending in that range I guess we're not sending anything out at that range. What if the lil green men decided that this was an optimal range to watch also so they aren't sending anything out either. We're each sitting behind a one-way mirror trying to see the other but evidently only seeing the blank reflection of our own window. :)
I use a simple spider program to search the web and usenet for information that might be of use to me. Daily it sucks in a couple hundred megs of mostly useless data that is further sorted and searched by a backend program. If I wanted to grab illegal information I could just cause the spider to have a wider range that would find that information but without making it look as if I were looking for it. Obviously since my spider'd information never gets shown to anyone else I'm not responsible for others receiving this information and since it's automated and along the same lines as programs that generate search engines which are common online it'd be rather difficult to place any legal blame on me for receiving such data. My basic point being is that all the positives mentioned for the use of pads can be acheived just by playing dumb and using already existant technology so why bother? I'm sure there are as many ways to hide messages as there are children who like to play at spy games. It'd be more useful IMO to just push for more encryption when sending data over the Internet and more systems like freenet.
After reading through this whole list of discusion there were only a handful of people who sounded like they even had any idea what they were talking about. That is my only guess as to why this topic was so spammed.
Okay so MNG isn't widely supported yet, that problem is fixed one application at a time isn't it? I've actually been using it for quite some time and think highly of the format.
PNG isn't widely supported yet? Not as widely supported as GIF or JPEG but I'm seeing it more and more often. Maybe it is more popular among the geek crowd than among graphic artist but it's starting to spread across the web and is supported in most graphic manipulation and viewing programs I've seen.
Internet Explorer, Photoshop, whatever can't use it.. I refer you back to answer #1. Support comes one app at a time. If you want your favorite app to support it too then tell them so.
Mozilla should be working on other things? Mozilla is an open project and people can contribute whatever they are interested in to the cause. MNG is a highly requested feature. If you want something else worked on then either do it yourself or fund someone else to do it.
PNG/MNG aren't good enough? Again if you don't like the way things are then improve upon it, fund someone else to improve upon it, or convince the patent holder of your favorite standard to make it free. Or just go on paying stupid fees if you want.
Mozilla has a dumb logo? What the shit does that have to do with MNG in Mozilla? Make a skin for it that has whatever logo you like.
Your favorite porn site doesn't use PNG/MNG so it must not be a real image format? Maybe they're to busy masturbating over their own models to think about saving their images in a better format. Get a life and get laid and stop wanking to porn sites.
Okay for people who have trouble with basic comprehension or just happened to be reading that while they were tired or distracted..
A.) they're to lazy
B.) they're to dumb
C.) they don't want to
Now it's seem to me your argument falls into C. Of course it could sort of fall into A and B also the way you worded it. If it was well coded, even as well coded as an average opensource project, then they should be able to easily port it to other systems. You must agree that any mindshare gained on competing systems is worth at least this minimum amount of work to compile it for another system. So either they just are to lazy to make that small effort or they are such bad programmers that it'd take a lot of work to port over.. or the upper management is to stupid to see the benefit of gaining mindshare within the camp of prehaps the greatest competitor they've had for years.
Just look at M$'s website sometime and you'll see that IE5 exists for both Solaris and HP-UX already. I dunno about you but usually when I want to compile most Unix apps they'll compile on anything that has gcc ported to it and isn't a totally dead platform. If Microsoft isn't porting IE to FreeBSD, Linux, and other Unix-based OS's it's because A.) they're to lazy B.) they are to dumb C.) they don't want to. I'm all for M$ products being ported over to give opensource apps some competition (though I'd never use any none opensourced apps if opensourced counterparts existed) but it seems to me Microsoft isn't going to be doing that for quite some time. I'll let you decide which of the above reasons is holding them back.
Transmeta is forcing Intel to work on the power consumption issues they would have otherwise ignored. AMD is forcing them to keep making their CPU's faster. A few years ago I would have said Intel was a monopoly but in these recent years they are having to work to stay king of the mountain and this is good. We get better products at a better price. Ten years ago the concept of a 1Ghz CPU that ran at 2 watts of power would have seemed impossible but now it's becoming a reality. Now if we could just find a CPU-maker who would figure out a way to make the darned things much cheaper we could really start a performance/price war. :)
This is where marketing comes in. Create an image of high quality and top notch support so the suits feel like their job won't be at risk if they buy 1000 Transmeta powered laptops rather than Intel powered. Make the price and speed comparable and beat them good with power consumption. This gives them a hook. Then create a bonus program for sales agents (often called spiffs) at various big suppliers so that they make more for pushing Transmeta powered products. AMD has used this to great success as have almost every other computer product that lives past it's first year or two. It doesn't matter which is better, it matters which the customer wants to buy and that depends on which the sales person pitches as being the best. Competition is great for consumers, it brings new choices and better quality and price. It is good for sales people because it lines their pockets. :)
:)
As someone who has done a lot of sales jobs to fund my own programming/engineering projects.
As we switch over from the AOL/Time-Warner model of the Internet to really equalized peer-peer Internet we'll probably see the web, and the rest of the Internet moving to a model more like the Napster model where people share between themselves. I remember when the web was new and it was like that, just lots of high quality personal and educational sites. Then banner ads and spam mailers came and tried to impose their centralized corporate Spamnet on us. Now that they've seen that most people aren't interested they'll hopefully continue the current trend of backing off on the banners and spam. Large sites will probably be community projects with sponsors for the more expensive things they might need. There will still be online stores and various other ways to make money online but finally the Internet will lose some of it's Los Vegas neon lights selling everything from Coca-Cola to used panties. People who want to sell online with spam, ad banners, subscriptions, micro-payments, and whatever else are kidding themselves if they think they are going to make a fortune. Sure you can fill niche markets that way but given a choice between free/spamless and expensive/spam people are going to choose the first almost always. Call that Shoppers Psychology 101.. people like cheap and they don't like to be bothered.
I believe that Crusoe's software is all below the OS level. To the OS it's just another x86 processor so any software that runs on Intel x86 should run on a Crusoe processor also.
Also they've said they won't be using the CPU at it's own instruction-set level both because it'd defeat the purpose of code-morphing software and also because the processor is designed specificly to be run by a code-morpher and isn't appropiate to use without the code-morphing layer. Important features of a CPU are left to the code-morphing layer. Transmeta's version of Linux, to my understanding, is just a normal lite version of x86 Linux w/ a few extra's thrown in (all which are still open so don't worry).
I'd think they'd only have to pay an OEM price to the Linux distro if the distro itself was going to handle support. It'd be impossible for the distro to charge a per-seat price if they weren't offering some additional service above what you get from a free download of the software.
:)
As far as the Microsoft tax goes, many OEM's actually have to pay more to Microsoft if they don't include Windows on the machines. Though after thinking it over this may be a winning plan, I'd gladly pay money not to have Windows on my machine. Anyone else willing to send Microsoft $50/yr not to write software or otherwise interfere with decent computers everywhere?