Fast forward to Peoplesoft v9+ and beyond that to Oracle Fusion. Oracle has already said that PS will be certified on Oracle middleware - do you really think Oracle would continue being dependent on BEA if they don't own BEA?
I wasn't considering vapourware as part of this discussion. No doubt you're correct that Oracle wouldn't want to be dependent on our software.
My budgets are tighter than ever before, and I'm tired of the constant need to figure out which vendor is causing me today's heartburn. I want *one* throat to choke - and I want my budget dollars to go farther. If I can negotiate an enterprise deal for ERP, CRM, DBMS, Middleware AND OS support - a 3rd party better be willing to bend over backwards to have a chance of competing. BEA doesn't have a clue how to play in that game.
Actually, BEA doesn't want to play that game, for similar reasons to why IBM doesn't play that game -- infrastructure is a separate concern from applications.
Many, many companies are separating these two concerns because they've been burned by the "one throat to choke" lock-in in the past. It's about writing a check blindly to your single source vendor , or actually taking control of your destiny.
Almost no vendor management organization worth its salt would put all of its chickens into one vendor's pot. Normally, 2 or 3 strategic vendors are the norm - not one. BEA has been lucky to be one of those in some industries that value infrastructure as much as applications (telecom, government (especially defense), utility, and some brokerages).
On the other hand, you're absolutely right that BEA doesn't play the games at the level of an SAP, given the relative budgetary sizes one speaks of with a BEA implementation ($m) vs. SAP ($100s of m). From my vantage point, it has been getting better at it, not worse, though this is sales region dependent.
Carl Icahn owns something like 15% of the company now, and is BEA's largest shareholder. He wants a sale. He just needs to convince more investors of this (80% are BEA's ownership is institutional, like mutual funds or private equity , hedge funds, etc).
BEA will get a better price... it's how the game is played. And if it somehow remains independent, it slaps egg on Larry's face.
BEA's stuff (like any business infrastructure) relies databases a lot, but the company isn't very database-oriented. It's a cultural thing in the Java world, I think to disdain databases. Witness all the frameworks seeking to hide the database and make it more "object oriented" What can ya do.
As for shutting up & taking the money... the board is doing *exactly* what it's paid to do, which is get the best value for its shareholders. The open market has already pushed BEAS stock above $18, so clearly many think that $17 is too low.
I don't have insider information. I am not a spokesperson at this time. This is just my opinion.
Basically, BEA wants to stay indepdenent, because it lets us do interesting things if we keep shareholders happy. And, by and large, we had been doing just that for the past 3 years, until licenses started to fall earlier this year. Wall Street forces a quarter by quarter mentality that's very hard to meet in a midsized company, in my opinion, given that the nature of "infrastructure software" involves longer sales cycles than when the dot-com bubble kept the "J2EE app server" purchase orders flowing in.
For those that suggest BEA's WebLogic is somehow commoditized and is the source of all of our woes, please understand a few things:
- BEA sells a *lot* more than an app server. Both Tuxedo and WebLogic Server have not been a sales focus for years at BEA, at least in North America -- Tux is still growing in Asia. The core products are still a cash cow, so we invest most of our R&D into it, but it doesn't account for the growth we've had since 2002. Most of that has been from Portal, Integration, and the new AquaLogic stuff.
- BEA contributes a lot to Java open source -- it's on the Eclipse board, it runs two Apache projects, is a major contributer and partner with Interface21 (the Spring guys), etc.
- Open source has never been BEA's biggest competitor. IBM and Oracle are. Really. The reason is that a major portion of BEA's sales focus is on enterprise license deals in the $million$ range. In the smaller deals, that's more likely where you see.NET rearing its head a lot. Sure, there is some JBoss (and a lot more Tomcat!). But, JBoss generates around $22 million annually. BEA makes that in under a week. And lest you say "But, this doesn't measure the free deployments!", we (and Oracle) don't care about those -- most companies aren't going to adopt an open source software solution for a production use without at least a support contract! Support , subscription, consulting, etc. is how RedHat is viable, it's also how BEA makes most of its revenue.
- BEA's *new* license growth had fallen recently, but maintenance and overall revenue continues to rise. That means that, the *rate* in which our middleware is being acquired is slowing for us as of late, not that people have somehow stopped buying our stuff. So, yep, we could be doing a better job improving & selling what we have with AquaLogic and WebLogic, but it's not doom and gloom times here. Maybe it will be better under another company, I donno. Part of the problem is that pure "middleware" in general is a hard sell, as companies like TIBCO are also feeling right now -- SOA was the latest trend, with some reasonable enthusiasm and growth associated with it, but the real fortune was made in the peak of the dot-com boom, and it's hard to replicate that sort of hype. Oracle sells middleware along side applications, databases, security suites, etc., so it's not quite as hard to sell the business on the benefits.
- I have no idea what the article is talking about with regards to SAP. I think NetWeaver is a crap pile, but that doesn't mean they're dead if they don't buy us. They could go open source, or improve it.... People stick with SAP because they're locked in, not because NetWeaver is supposed to be better.
- Even if this deal doesn't go through, BEA is viable enough to stay independent. It has over $1B in the bank, it generates high free cash flow, and if we could get this stock options review over & done with, we could actually have some good information for the Street to price us properly. The question really is about the stock price -- whether the shareholders think we can raise it on our own, or someone else can do a better job of it.
Anyway, I've been pretty happy with the company for the past 3 years. Regardless of what happens, it's exciting times.
There are very few "teachers" out there, those who can illuminate a subject and adapt to all the various types of learning styles, personalities, and perspectives that various students may have. This is not a skill that we really know how to teach itself, it's more of a talent.
The second, more common effective educator, is the "pedagogue" (his use of the term), by which he implies, professionals who help motivate students to structure their own learning. This is a skill set we can teach & codify.
I think that new technology has a lot to do with increasing the pace of self-driven learning. In that vein, new technology is very important. I think old technology is great too (libraries, blackboards, etc.), but the ability of (for example) hypertext to provide context to information is an extremely powerful agent to learning, especially for those with short attention spans.
As for "damn kids are all entitled with no attention span" carmudgeons, I'd note that this seems to be a mainstream variant of Nerd Attention Deficit Disorder (NADD), which seems to be a way of coping with the increasing information glut. Some people bubble up, some people fixate on one medium, others soak it all in, but as a result wind up with "mile wide / inch deep" knowledge, for better or worse.
The trick, for educators, I believe, will be a way to structure education so that people can be specialists in several areas. This keeps things interesting. The second is to allow those areas of speciality to arise based on the student's strengths & talents. Sudbury Schools seem to be a growing approach, but I'm sure there are others.
Finally, there needs to be a sense of urgency instilled in students that is gradually increased as they grow... the work ethic is a hard thing to instill. I know from my experience in school that I coasted with 80s for 18 years... and then fell flat on my face in university. And it took me *years* to develop the work ethic to work on distasteful things, something I still struggle with. I was lucky enough to get high-paying jobs I enjoyed for almost 10+ years before I had to really do something important that I disliked. It's a growing experience that I wish I figured out earlier in life.
Roberts was a major proponent of virtual circuit networks like X.25 or ATM. His experience was the design of the original ARPAnet, which was not based on TCP/IP, but was packet-based (which was the big deal). His successors, Kahn & Cerf, built TCP/IP, which was really adopted around 1983.
I'm ambivalent about virtual circuits. I think there's benefit to them in some ways, but broadly speaking its benefits does not outweigh those of a neutral network.
Yes it is just marketing drivel. Well, if people want to use it, fine but it really doesn't mean anything concrete. Noone started talking about "cell phone 2.0" or "Car extreme" or whatever just because they became gradually more advanced over time.
Well they did make a pretty big deal about Hybrid cars, or Minivans, when they came out. And lots of people have spoken about 3G (nerds included) as if it were the second coming.
Design center? Are you in marketing? I can't parse this paragraph to be honest.
What I meant is that Web sites in the past were restricted to "lowest common denominator" PCs and dial-up connections. The target audience & the media used in sites have changed now that broadband is common place.
Plenty of people used BBSs. But, I don't see the point -- more people using the same technologies doesn't make it a new technology.
I don't think people are really saying it's primarily about a new technology, though such beasts exist -- OpenID, RSS, Atom, Atompub, Microformats. Web 2 is more accurately a bunch of related technologies that are being used in new & different ways together. The change is more about the social acceptance of existing technologies.
Perhaps that's irrelevant to some, but it's sort of like saying "Mac OS X is just BSD-based *NIX, what's the big deal? It's old technology!".
And now they are trying to use various SOAP technologies, XML, etc to rig sites together using technologies really not appropriate for the task, compared to just running whatever (even XML) over a TCP socket. SOAP etc. are fine for some stuff, but a lot of the uses for it are quite inappropriate.
Agreed. And (rightly or wrongly), the sudden interest and acceptance of alternative approaches like RESTful HTTP is attached to this whole Web-two-dot-oh thing.
Overall, my point is that there are some benefits to hyped labels, and it's not just about marketing. They don't always outweigh the annoyances, but tis human nature to seek the next bandwagon, or to destroy the old one.
Students aren't going to learn much if you provide shoddy essential services to people living on campus. They're going to want to watch TV, play games, etc.
Now, if it's possible to order 3rd party networks such as Hi-Speed Cable or DSL, there at least is an outlet. I recall on my dorm (many) years ago a difficult time getting access to 3rd party networks, hence why the university's network was used.
I'll also note that some on-campus residences are a source of income for the university (i.e. they're not run at a loss), and actually advertise access to high speed Internet as a feature to entice them to stay on campus vs. scramble to off-campus housing. Some even require at least 1-2 years of on campus stay. If I've been spending most of my high school years with high speed access and now am forced to deal with degraded service, I would not be pleased.
I swear a bunch of you still want to read web pages on Lynx, think the web is a glorified shared file system, and were happier with 1200 baud BBS'.
Life changes; get a helmet.
Web 2.0 is not just marketing drivel. It shouldn't be viewed pedantically as a "revision two-point-oh" of a piece of software. Mostly it's a label for the new wave of investment into the web, that mostly stopped in 2001 after the bust. Many stopped caring about the Web as a fertile ground for new experiences or businesses. So, Web 2.0 is a useful label for the qualitative change that's obviously happening on the Web today if you actually looked around at how many ways that *many more people* are interacting.
Just because we had interactivity in 1998 with Slashdot doesn't make it a "trend" that the mainstream users understood. It was a nerd site!
Consider - Web 1.0 was the "World Wide Wait". Many more people have broadband now. That changes the design centre of web sites.
- Slashdot, BBS', etc. were not really used by your average teenager in the 1990's. They were used by techies. Today, almost every teenager is on Myspace or Facebook, or Youtube.
- With blogs & trackbacks, we're actually seeing a decentralized discussion forum on almost *every* piece of content on the web. That's quite different experience than centrally submitting stories to Slashdot's editors.
- With web 1.0, all the hype was how it was going to be like TV. Turns out that's not the case, it's much more participatory. Obvious to a techie, but Web 2.0 is the rest of the world waking up to that fact.
- In 1997, *most* techies who thought they knew better were trying bloody hard to turn the Web into CORBA. Today, that would sound ridiculous. The REST architectural style was ignored for years, it's now becoming recognized as a major factor in the web's success.
- Most people didn't really "get" hyperlinks 10 years ago. There were lawsuits as to whether you could deep link! People wanted to force you onto their website, and keep you there, like a TV channel. Today, with Wiki's, Blogs, etc., everything is much more decentralized.
Interestingly, something like Facebook has pulled off an interesting balancing act, where links are pervasive, but you still stay on the Facebook site while exploring the games & applications that are all integrated.
Anyway, with any trend, the hype often outstrips the reality. The only important thing is that Web 2.0 implies "The Web is Back".
I think Web 2.0 is a recognition that the Web, as a medium, is much richer than the mainstream originally thought. So, mostly it's investment hype -- VCs are putting money into the Web again.
From a qualitative perspective, it's all old news, but, as Gibson would say, "the future is already here, just not evenly distributed". A lot of the social & interactive aspects of the Web circa 1997 were pretty geeky. Today, they're common place.
So, I'd say Web 2.0 is: - The web experience when most people have broadband. Web 1.0 was nicknamed the "world wide wait', if you'll recall.
- A recognition that the Web is actually an integration platform. In 1997, there was huge pressure to turn HTTP into CORBA. That was resisted by the W3C. The REST architectural style was ignored for many years during the development of so-called "Web Services", but it's re-emerging as a major factor in the web's success.
- The dynamic AJAX stuff that isn't proprietary to one browser
- The recognition that most people aren't consuming content from big content providers, ala TV. that's what people *thought* the web would/should become in Web 1.0. Turns out that it's a lot more participatory. Sure, there's lots of content that's created by pros, but also tremendous amounts of amateur content (youtube, myspace, facebook, etc.).
- Besides "participation", the big deal now seems to be that people understand "links". I recall in 1998, most content was all about "portals", where it was all big flashy media, but was all about keeping you on that site. You wouldn't see inline links in blocks of text, you would see buttons or big titles.
Easy linking is the big deal behind Wiki's and Wikipedia. More than any other feature, they made linking easy. You just had to SmooshWordsTogether on Ward's Wiki, instead of using an HTML anchor tag. That alone took a good 10+ years to trickle into the mainstream.
- You also see fewer people demanding Lynx-readable websites.:-)
Anyway, it's all old hat for a techie, but very new for the mainstream, and its mostly being noticed because of the new generation of high school and college kids that grew up with the web.
Apple used a baseband chip that is 3rd party and well understood. It has a Hayes (AT) command set, just like a consumer modem. One of those commands is "sim unlock", but it requires an 8 digit passcode. The unlock exploits a buffer overrun to effectively make this password "00000000".
The bricking, as far as I can tell, is due to how certain information that tied the firmware to AT&T is overwritten. It will require some creativity to get it back.
That's misleading. There absolutely is a strong correlation between brand presence and sales, and most of the brand presence of the iPhone is absolutely due to word of mouth and positive reviews reflecting on the quality of the product.
In the United States.
Europe too.
Relatively few "normal people" buy $700 phones.
The iPhone is not $700. I'll note that most first release smart phones are at least $400-500.
As long as those who might be interested and capable of buying one know about it, that's all that really matters. Making sure the rest of the universe knows about your new shiny won't sell more phones.
That may be your prefferred marketing strategy, but it is not a matter of fact. Apple's betting that letting the rest of the universe know about it will create a new market opportunity. It worked with the iPod.
Being an attention whore does make product failure a much more spectacular and embarrassing event though. The Segway comes to mind. Everyone knows about that "revolutionary new product."
Which is a piss poor comparison with the iPhone, on many levels.
Time will tell if your estimates are true, but Nokia N95 has a) been out 3 months longer, b) is available in way, way more markets than the iPhone.
The iPhone's success is unquestionable in terms of brand presence: *everyone* knows about it, even non-gadget people. To contrast, relatively few "normal people" know about the N95.
My point is that I think people are taking the quote a bit too seriously. They're not going to put most of their money into preventative measures, they're going to invest in new features.
Both Steve Jobs and Greg Joswiak have indicated they have a "neutral" stance on 3rd party hacking that's related to native application development. The area they have problems with is SIM unlocking.
I'm Canadian, I've been paying AT&T for a while (they make it a PITA too when you don't have a U.S. credit card). I don't have an issue paying AT&T money given how crappy our data plans are in Canada so far anyway.
Now, I've unlocked my phone, and am even happier. Sure, I'll be disappointed when future modem firmware updates break the unlock, but frankly, I expect it. There are no guarantees with hacking. But I also expect the hackers to overcome new firmware changes within a matter of days, unless there is a major software change to the way the iPhone firmware works (not likely).
In one sense, Kerberos was a way of doing secure communication & authentication before PKI-based schemes like SSL became popular. It only used symmetric encryption, so required the central ticket granting service. Newer standards are incorporating assymmetric encryption to make the protocol even stronger against attack....
Kerberos is a bit rough to understand at first. The documentation exists out there (Microsoft has some of the better stuff), but it can be pretty detailed if you're not comfortable with encryption & binary protocols. One of the best ways to play with it is to run Wireshark to watch Kerberos traffic, as it can parse the packets and tell you what's going on.
The major confusing thing about Kerberos, for a developer, is the GSS-API. Kerberos doesn't have a standard API -- MIT has theirs, and Microsoft has their ActiveDirectory API, etc. Whereas GSS stands for "General Security Service" and is a general purpose wrapper API for security services like Kerberos, regardless of implementation. Microsoft supports GSS to some degree, but doesn't expose all of its features, I don't believe. There are multiple language bindings, C being the most common, but also.NET, and Java. Both GSS-API and Kerberos allow for message authentication codes (like digital signature, but again using symmetric crypto), secure communications (like SSL), along with mutual authentication, and even delegation (propagating identity across multiple tiers, say a Web Browser, to Web Server, to SQL database).
Things get even more confusing when you look at Kerberos over HTTP (which is how Microsoft does single-sign on with Windows + Internet Explorer). This is mostly accomplished with SPNEGO, which is a "Simple & Protected GSS-API NEGOtation mechanism". So, here we have a wrapper protocol (using ASN.1 format) around Kerberos that is almost always going to be Kerberos anyway, stuffed into an HTTP header, requiring excessive HTTP round trips for "negotiation". It works, but mostly on intranets.
I'm not a scientist, and I had a heck of a time parsing through the summary, but I think I get it now.
1. An old economic model is dying: charging high fees for publishing & distribution of scholarly works 2. A new model is emerging: open, primarily web-based, access to these scholarly works after peer review 3. Publishers are desperate to retain their revenue streams, and will use PR, lobbying, rhetoric, and eventually legal means to stop this trend. 4. Vested interests (those who rely on the reputation of said journals) don't want to change the status quo.
It reads to me that PRISM ~= RIAA, circa 1999. The first salvos began with Napster's release, the first salvos here are beginning with rumblings of OA legislation.
Obviously there could/should be a nominal fee for hard copy redistribution, to manage the infrastructure of a such a press. But, when people can print their own copies with open access, this probably won't be needed.
The *real* economic value, it seems, of these publishers is the "brand reputation" associated with particular journals, which select certain articles for publication. Couldn't this be preserved by viewing these not as publishers, but as mere "content aggregators" of (open access) content? There's value in that, and a business could built on it, I'd think. (e.g. you're reading an example here w/ Slashdot).
As a watcher of Heroes, Jericho, and Battlestar Galactica, I must say that the "Girl in the Fireplace" was one of the best Doctor Who episodes they've ever done. The quality of an individual episode is what's evaluated here, not that it's a part of a 40-year old framework.
Heroes struck me as candy on the level of Prison Break, with a lot of comic-book sensibility thrown in. Jericho is more (good) drama than Sci Fi.
Having said this: - The Hugos were for shows that aired through Summer 2006. Heroes and Jericho will be up for next year's awards. - They're going to have a heck of a competition with Doctor Who + Stephen Moffat again. The episode "Blink" was fantastic. There's also the "Human Nature/Family of Blood" duo, by Paul Cornell - Battlestar Galactica is much more daring and deserving of recognition.
Slashdot Mirror
Hehe, wish I could help, but I never got the box of T-shirts, and the venue never called me to indicate they had ever received any ...
On the bright side, Taco did send me the PDF for the poster I did up.
Fast forward to Peoplesoft v9+ and beyond that to Oracle Fusion. Oracle has already said that PS will be certified on Oracle middleware - do you really think Oracle would continue being dependent on BEA if they don't own BEA?
I wasn't considering vapourware as part of this discussion. No doubt you're correct that Oracle wouldn't want to be dependent on our software.
My budgets are tighter than ever before, and I'm tired of the constant need to figure out which vendor is causing me today's heartburn. I want *one* throat to choke - and I want my budget dollars to go farther. If I can negotiate an enterprise deal for ERP, CRM, DBMS, Middleware AND OS support - a 3rd party better be willing to bend over backwards to have a chance of competing. BEA doesn't have a clue how to play in that game.
Actually, BEA doesn't want to play that game, for similar reasons to why IBM doesn't play that game -- infrastructure is a separate concern from applications.
Many, many companies are separating these two concerns because they've been burned by the "one throat to choke" lock-in in the past. It's about writing a check blindly to your single source vendor , or actually taking control of your destiny.
Almost no vendor management organization worth its salt would put all of its chickens into one vendor's pot. Normally, 2 or 3 strategic vendors are the norm - not one. BEA has been lucky to be one of those in some industries that value infrastructure as much as applications (telecom, government (especially defense), utility, and some brokerages).
On the other hand, you're absolutely right that BEA doesn't play the games at the level of an SAP, given the relative budgetary sizes one speaks of with a BEA implementation ($m) vs. SAP ($100s of m). From my vantage point, it has been getting better at it, not worse, though this is sales region dependent.
Cheers
Carl Icahn owns something like 15% of the company now, and is BEA's largest shareholder. He wants a sale. He just needs to convince more investors of this (80% are BEA's ownership is institutional, like mutual funds or private equity , hedge funds, etc).
BEA will get a better price... it's how the game is played. And if it somehow remains independent, it slaps egg on Larry's face.
BEA's stuff (like any business infrastructure) relies databases a lot, but the company isn't very database-oriented. It's a cultural thing in the Java world, I think to disdain databases. Witness all the frameworks seeking to hide the database and make it more "object oriented" What can ya do.
SOX audits have everything to do with your internal practices & logic -- the underlying infrastructure isn't going to be the determining factor.
There are two splits in your graphs, so the current price makes the shares worth a lot more than they were in the late 90's.
Regarding the multi-year horizon, let's compare BEAS to its competitors over the last 5 years... the value is clearly there.
As for shutting up & taking the money... the board is doing *exactly* what it's paid to do, which is get the best value for its shareholders. The open market has already pushed BEAS stock above $18, so clearly many think that $17 is too low.
You're absolutely right, I misspoke. I meant two say, "Two Apache projects are run by current BEA employees".
I don't have insider information. I am not a spokesperson at this time. This is just my opinion.
.NET rearing its head a lot. Sure, there is some JBoss (and a lot more Tomcat!). But, JBoss generates around $22 million annually. BEA makes that in under a week. And lest you say "But, this doesn't measure the free deployments!", we (and Oracle) don't care about those -- most companies aren't going to adopt an open source software solution for a production use without at least a support contract! Support , subscription, consulting, etc. is how RedHat is viable, it's also how BEA makes most of its revenue.
Basically, BEA wants to stay indepdenent, because it lets us do interesting things if we keep shareholders happy. And, by and large, we had been doing just that for the past 3 years, until licenses started to fall earlier this year. Wall Street forces a quarter by quarter mentality that's very hard to meet in a midsized company, in my opinion, given that the nature of "infrastructure software" involves longer sales cycles than when the dot-com bubble kept the "J2EE app server" purchase orders flowing in.
For those that suggest BEA's WebLogic is somehow commoditized and is the source of all of our woes, please understand a few things:
- BEA sells a *lot* more than an app server. Both Tuxedo and WebLogic Server have not been a sales focus for years at BEA, at least in North America -- Tux is still growing in Asia. The core products are still a cash cow, so we invest most of our R&D into it, but it doesn't account for the growth we've had since 2002. Most of that has been from Portal, Integration, and the new AquaLogic stuff.
- BEA contributes a lot to Java open source -- it's on the Eclipse board, it runs two Apache projects, is a major contributer and partner with Interface21 (the Spring guys), etc.
- Open source has never been BEA's biggest competitor. IBM and Oracle are. Really. The reason is that a major portion of BEA's sales focus is on enterprise license deals in the $million$ range. In the smaller deals, that's more likely where you see
- BEA's *new* license growth had fallen recently, but maintenance and overall revenue continues to rise. That means that, the *rate* in which our middleware is being acquired is slowing for us as of late, not that people have somehow stopped buying our stuff. So, yep, we could be doing a better job improving & selling what we have with AquaLogic and WebLogic, but it's not doom and gloom times here. Maybe it will be better under another company, I donno. Part of the problem is that pure "middleware" in general is a hard sell, as companies like TIBCO are also feeling right now -- SOA was the latest trend, with some reasonable enthusiasm and growth associated with it, but the real fortune was made in the peak of the dot-com boom, and it's hard to replicate that sort of hype. Oracle sells middleware along side applications, databases, security suites, etc., so it's not quite as hard to sell the business on the benefits.
- I have no idea what the article is talking about with regards to SAP. I think NetWeaver is a crap pile, but that doesn't mean they're dead if they don't buy us. They could go open source, or improve it.... People stick with SAP because they're locked in, not because NetWeaver is supposed to be better.
- Even if this deal doesn't go through, BEA is viable enough to stay independent. It has over $1B in the bank, it generates high free cash flow, and if we could get this stock options review over & done with, we could actually have some good information for the Street to price us properly. The question really is about the stock price -- whether the shareholders think we can raise it on our own, or someone else can do a better job of it.
Anyway, I've been pretty happy with the company for the past 3 years. Regardless of what happens, it's exciting times.
PeopleSoft runs on Tuxedo, not WebLogic. You might be able to run integration services under WLS, but the core is a Tux app.
As for packaged deals, yeah, it makes competition hard, but we've whupped Oracle in competitive shoot outs on the product merits more often then not.
I remember Peter Drucker discussing education in his autobiography, Adventures of a Bystander.
... and then fell flat on my face in university. And it took me *years* to develop the work ethic to work on distasteful things, something I still struggle with. I was lucky enough to get high-paying jobs I enjoyed for almost 10+ years before I had to really do something important that I disliked. It's a growing experience that I wish I figured out earlier in life.
There are very few "teachers" out there, those who can illuminate a subject and adapt to all the various types of learning styles, personalities, and perspectives that various students may have. This is not a skill that we really know how to teach itself, it's more of a talent.
The second, more common effective educator, is the "pedagogue" (his use of the term), by which he implies, professionals who help motivate students to structure their own learning. This is a skill set we can teach & codify.
I think that new technology has a lot to do with increasing the pace of self-driven learning. In that vein, new technology is very important. I think old technology is great too (libraries, blackboards, etc.), but the ability of (for example) hypertext to provide context to information is an extremely powerful agent to learning, especially for those with short attention spans.
As for "damn kids are all entitled with no attention span" carmudgeons, I'd note that this seems to be a mainstream variant of Nerd Attention Deficit Disorder (NADD), which seems to be a way of coping with the increasing information glut. Some people bubble up, some people fixate on one medium, others soak it all in, but as a result wind up with "mile wide / inch deep" knowledge, for better or worse.
The trick, for educators, I believe, will be a way to structure education so that people can be specialists in several areas. This keeps things interesting. The second is to allow those areas of speciality to arise based on the student's strengths & talents. Sudbury Schools seem to be a growing approach, but I'm sure there are others.
Finally, there needs to be a sense of urgency instilled in students that is gradually increased as they grow... the work ethic is a hard thing to instill. I know from my experience in school that I coasted with 80s for 18 years
Roberts was a major proponent of virtual circuit networks like X.25 or ATM. His experience was the design of the original ARPAnet, which was not based on TCP/IP, but was packet-based (which was the big deal). His successors, Kahn & Cerf, built TCP/IP, which was really adopted around 1983.
I'm ambivalent about virtual circuits. I think there's benefit to them in some ways, but broadly speaking its benefits does not outweigh those of a neutral network.
>
I think I missed the account signup by a few days/weeks, I forget. Early 98, definitely.
Yes it is just marketing drivel. Well, if people want to use it, fine but it really doesn't mean anything concrete. Noone started talking about "cell phone 2.0" or "Car extreme" or whatever just because they became gradually more advanced over time.
Well they did make a pretty big deal about Hybrid cars, or Minivans, when they came out. And lots of people have spoken about 3G (nerds included) as if it were the second coming.
Design center? Are you in marketing? I can't parse this paragraph to be honest.
What I meant is that Web sites in the past were restricted to "lowest common denominator" PCs and dial-up connections. The target audience & the media used in sites have changed now that broadband is common place.
Plenty of people used BBSs. But, I don't see the point -- more people using the same technologies doesn't make it a new technology.
I don't think people are really saying it's primarily about a new technology, though such beasts exist -- OpenID, RSS, Atom, Atompub, Microformats. Web 2 is more accurately a bunch of related technologies that are being used in new & different ways together. The change is more about the social acceptance of existing technologies.
Perhaps that's irrelevant to some, but it's sort of like saying "Mac OS X is just BSD-based *NIX, what's the big deal? It's old technology!".
And now they are trying to use various SOAP technologies, XML, etc to rig sites together using technologies really not appropriate for the task, compared to just running whatever (even XML) over a TCP socket. SOAP etc. are fine for some stuff, but a lot of the uses for it are quite inappropriate.
Agreed. And (rightly or wrongly), the sudden interest and acceptance of alternative approaches like RESTful HTTP is attached to this whole Web-two-dot-oh thing.
Overall, my point is that there are some benefits to hyped labels, and it's not just about marketing. They don't always outweigh the annoyances, but tis human nature to seek the next bandwagon, or to destroy the old one.
Somehow this didn't make it into the parent:
Congrats Rob & team. Cranking out essential reading for 10 years is a big deal. Cheers.
I've left 1135 comments since I first joined in 1998, and I seem to keep coming back for punishment^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hentertainment.
I later lucked out and was the 10 millionth Slashdot visitor (I think in 1998?), my 15 minutes of nerd fame, heh.
I don't think he was being a jerk.
Students aren't going to learn much if you provide shoddy essential services to people living on campus. They're going to want to watch TV, play games, etc.
Now, if it's possible to order 3rd party networks such as Hi-Speed Cable or DSL, there at least is an outlet. I recall on my dorm (many) years ago a difficult time getting access to 3rd party networks, hence why the university's network was used.
I'll also note that some on-campus residences are a source of income for the university (i.e. they're not run at a loss), and actually advertise access to high speed Internet as a feature to entice them to stay on campus vs. scramble to off-campus housing. Some even require at least 1-2 years of on campus stay. If I've been spending most of my high school years with high speed access and now am forced to deal with degraded service, I would not be pleased.
I swear a bunch of you still want to read web pages on Lynx, think the web is a glorified shared file system, and were happier with 1200 baud BBS'.
Life changes; get a helmet.
Web 2.0 is not just marketing drivel. It shouldn't be viewed pedantically as a "revision two-point-oh" of a piece of software. Mostly it's a label for the new wave of investment into the web, that mostly stopped in 2001 after the bust. Many stopped caring about the Web as a fertile ground for new experiences or businesses. So, Web 2.0 is a useful label for the qualitative change that's obviously happening on the Web today if you actually looked around at how many ways that *many more people* are interacting.
Just because we had interactivity in 1998 with Slashdot doesn't make it a "trend" that the mainstream users understood. It was a nerd site!
Consider
- Web 1.0 was the "World Wide Wait". Many more people have broadband now. That changes the design centre of web sites.
- Slashdot, BBS', etc. were not really used by your average teenager in the 1990's. They were used by techies. Today, almost every teenager is on Myspace or Facebook, or Youtube.
- With blogs & trackbacks, we're actually seeing a decentralized discussion forum on almost *every* piece of content on the web. That's quite different experience than centrally submitting stories to Slashdot's editors.
- With web 1.0, all the hype was how it was going to be like TV. Turns out that's not the case, it's much more participatory. Obvious to a techie, but Web 2.0 is the rest of the world waking up to that fact.
- In 1997, *most* techies who thought they knew better were trying bloody hard to turn the Web into CORBA. Today, that would sound ridiculous. The REST architectural style was ignored for years, it's now becoming recognized as a major factor in the web's success.
- Most people didn't really "get" hyperlinks 10 years ago. There were lawsuits as to whether you could deep link! People wanted to force you onto their website, and keep you there, like a TV channel. Today, with Wiki's, Blogs, etc., everything is much more decentralized.
Interestingly, something like Facebook has pulled off an interesting balancing act, where links are pervasive, but you still stay on the Facebook site while exploring the games & applications that are all integrated.
Anyway, with any trend, the hype often outstrips the reality. The only important thing is that Web 2.0 implies "The Web is Back".
I think Web 2.0 is a recognition that the Web, as a medium, is much richer than the mainstream originally thought. So, mostly it's investment hype -- VCs are putting money into the Web again.
:-)
From a qualitative perspective, it's all old news, but, as Gibson would say, "the future is already here, just not evenly distributed". A lot of the social & interactive aspects of the Web circa 1997 were pretty geeky. Today, they're common place.
So, I'd say Web 2.0 is:
- The web experience when most people have broadband. Web 1.0 was nicknamed the "world wide wait', if you'll recall.
- A recognition that the Web is actually an integration platform. In 1997, there was huge pressure to turn HTTP into CORBA. That was resisted by the W3C. The REST architectural style was ignored for many years during the development of so-called "Web Services", but it's re-emerging as a major factor in the web's success.
- The dynamic AJAX stuff that isn't proprietary to one browser
- The recognition that most people aren't consuming content from big content providers, ala TV. that's what people *thought* the web would/should become in Web 1.0. Turns out that it's a lot more participatory. Sure, there's lots of content that's created by pros, but also tremendous amounts of amateur content (youtube, myspace, facebook, etc.).
- Besides "participation", the big deal now seems to be that people understand "links". I recall in 1998, most content was all about "portals", where it was all big flashy media, but was all about keeping you on that site. You wouldn't see inline links in blocks of text, you would see buttons or big titles.
Easy linking is the big deal behind Wiki's and Wikipedia. More than any other feature, they made linking easy. You just had to SmooshWordsTogether on Ward's Wiki, instead of using an HTML anchor tag. That alone took a good 10+ years to trickle into the mainstream.
- You also see fewer people demanding Lynx-readable websites.
Anyway, it's all old hat for a techie, but very new for the mainstream, and its mostly being noticed because of the new generation of high school and college kids that grew up with the web.
Sort of.
Apple used a baseband chip that is 3rd party and well understood. It has a Hayes (AT) command set, just like a consumer modem. One of those commands is "sim unlock", but it requires an 8 digit passcode.
The unlock exploits a buffer overrun to effectively make this password "00000000".
The bricking, as far as I can tell, is due to how certain information that tied the firmware to AT&T is overwritten. It will require some creativity to get it back.
Brand presence != sales. Brand presence != quality product.
That's misleading. There absolutely is a strong correlation between brand presence and sales, and most of the brand presence of the iPhone is absolutely due to word of mouth and positive reviews reflecting on the quality of the product.
In the United States.
Europe too.
Relatively few "normal people" buy $700 phones.
The iPhone is not $700. I'll note that most first release smart phones are at least $400-500.
As long as those who might be interested and capable of buying one know about it, that's all that really matters. Making sure the rest of the universe knows about your new shiny won't sell more phones.
That may be your prefferred marketing strategy, but it is not a matter of fact. Apple's betting that letting the rest of the universe know about it will create a new market opportunity. It worked with the iPod.
Being an attention whore does make product failure a much more spectacular and embarrassing event though. The Segway comes to mind. Everyone knows about that "revolutionary new product."
Which is a piss poor comparison with the iPhone, on many levels.
Time will tell if your estimates are true, but Nokia N95 has a) been out 3 months longer, b) is available in way, way more markets than the iPhone.
The iPhone's success is unquestionable in terms of brand presence: *everyone* knows about it, even non-gadget people. To contrast, relatively few "normal people" know about the N95.
And Microsoft became one of the most profitable companies in the world for 20+ years by.... not locking their customers in?
My point is that I think people are taking the quote a bit too seriously. They're not going to put most of their money into preventative measures, they're going to invest in new features.
Both Steve Jobs and Greg Joswiak have indicated they have a "neutral" stance on 3rd party hacking that's related to native application development. The area they have problems with is SIM unlocking.
I'm Canadian, I've been paying AT&T for a while (they make it a PITA too when you don't have a U.S. credit card). I don't have an issue paying AT&T money given how crappy our data plans are in Canada so far anyway.
Now, I've unlocked my phone, and am even happier. Sure, I'll be disappointed when future modem firmware updates break the unlock, but frankly, I expect it. There are no guarantees with hacking. But I also expect the hackers to overcome new firmware changes within a matter of days, unless there is a major software change to the way the iPhone firmware works (not likely).
In one sense, Kerberos was a way of doing secure communication & authentication before PKI-based schemes like SSL became popular. It only used symmetric encryption, so required the central ticket granting service. Newer standards are incorporating assymmetric encryption to make the protocol even stronger against attack....
.NET, and Java. Both GSS-API and Kerberos allow for message authentication codes (like digital signature, but again using symmetric crypto), secure communications (like SSL), along with mutual authentication, and even delegation (propagating identity across multiple tiers, say a Web Browser, to Web Server, to SQL database).
Kerberos is a bit rough to understand at first. The documentation exists out there (Microsoft has some of the better stuff), but it can be pretty detailed if you're not comfortable with encryption & binary protocols. One of the best ways to play with it is to run Wireshark to watch Kerberos traffic, as it can parse the packets and tell you what's going on.
The major confusing thing about Kerberos, for a developer, is the GSS-API. Kerberos doesn't have a standard API -- MIT has theirs, and Microsoft has their ActiveDirectory API, etc. Whereas GSS stands for "General Security Service" and is a general purpose wrapper API for security services like Kerberos, regardless of implementation. Microsoft supports GSS to some degree, but doesn't expose all of its features, I don't believe. There are multiple language bindings, C being the most common, but also
Things get even more confusing when you look at Kerberos over HTTP (which is how Microsoft does single-sign on with Windows + Internet Explorer). This is mostly accomplished with SPNEGO, which is a "Simple & Protected GSS-API NEGOtation mechanism". So, here we have a wrapper protocol (using ASN.1 format) around Kerberos that is almost always going to be Kerberos anyway, stuffed into an HTTP header, requiring excessive HTTP round trips for "negotiation". It works, but mostly on intranets.
I'm not a scientist, and I had a heck of a time parsing through the summary, but I think I get it now.
1. An old economic model is dying: charging high fees for publishing & distribution of scholarly works
2. A new model is emerging: open, primarily web-based, access to these scholarly works after peer review
3. Publishers are desperate to retain their revenue streams, and will use PR, lobbying, rhetoric, and eventually legal means to stop this trend.
4. Vested interests (those who rely on the reputation of said journals) don't want to change the status quo.
It reads to me that PRISM ~= RIAA, circa 1999. The first salvos began with Napster's release, the first salvos here are beginning with rumblings of OA legislation.
Obviously there could/should be a nominal fee for hard copy redistribution, to manage the infrastructure of a such a press. But, when people can print their own copies with open access, this probably won't be needed.
The *real* economic value, it seems, of these publishers is the "brand reputation" associated with particular journals, which select certain articles for publication. Couldn't this be preserved by viewing these not as publishers, but as mere "content aggregators" of (open access) content? There's value in that, and a business could built on it, I'd think. (e.g. you're reading an example here w/ Slashdot).
As a watcher of Heroes, Jericho, and Battlestar Galactica, I must say that the "Girl in the Fireplace" was one of the best Doctor Who episodes they've ever done. The quality of an individual episode is what's evaluated here, not that it's a part of a 40-year old framework.
Heroes struck me as candy on the level of Prison Break, with a lot of comic-book sensibility thrown in.
Jericho is more (good) drama than Sci Fi.
Having said this:
- The Hugos were for shows that aired through Summer 2006. Heroes and Jericho will be up for next year's awards.
- They're going to have a heck of a competition with Doctor Who + Stephen Moffat again. The episode "Blink" was fantastic. There's also the "Human Nature/Family of Blood" duo, by Paul Cornell
- Battlestar Galactica is much more daring and deserving of recognition.