The developers' list has (rather unsurprisingly:) talked about this over the last week.
Here's a few (mostly unatributed - couldn't be bothered to tidy up) thoughts from developers on the list:
"What has, and will continue to make us successful is not just "selling
boxes". we sell both a solution and a platform on which to base
solutions. The developer community is a very important piece of our
puzzle, and I don't see that shrinking at all with this whole Sun deal.
As for black-box - several "appliance" vendors entered the market before
or close to the same time Cobalt did. Where are those black-box vendors
now?
Lastly, I wanted to say that just because of the Sun deal, I'd hardly
count on Cobalt going away. We now have more muscle at our disposal
than we ever did before, which means better prices, better products, and
better service. We have had many assurances that things will remain up
to us, so long as we continue to be successful (losing money doesn't
mean not being successful - building hardware isn't cheap, folks!)."
Tim Hockin - Software Engineer / OS Engineer
Cobalt Networks - thockin@cobalt.com
"It's not true, it's a *proposed* merger, which means it still has to be approved by the voting share holders and the board. You guys may be all for it, but it's not a done deal yet. If the acquisition goes through, it is not planned to be completed until Dec. 31. A lot can happen between now and
then."
"It's gonna happen, get used to it . The stock-premium was 40% at
announcement time; though I look for it to go down, 40% is hefty enough
so it'll stay attractive enough to enough of the stockholders. Many of
whom are employees, even top employees who were in on the deal, I'm sure
(entirely my speculation; I have NO inside information).
"
"Cobalt cashed in on the Linux hype. To deny otherwise would beggar reality.
They may not be completely profitable yet, but they've certainly benefited
from the early hype surrounding the OS."
OK, three instances Mr Coward (you must be really sure of your viewpoint;-)
1) For a competitive game to be interesting, there has to be a chance of winning (or at least not coming last;-). To take the chess analogy further, what would the point be of me playing Karpov at chess (if I got the chance) other than for fun?
2) Contra to US soda commercials et al, winning isn't the most important part in many activities/sports. Some people actually take part because they actually like the activity. Oh yes, it would be nice to be the winner, but it's (say) a 1 in 1000 chance and life's too short.
3)In the case of D&D etc - I don't play myself, but I would guess the reward is in developing friendship and understanding with your fellow players, rather than the alienation of always wanting to win.
Finally, perhaps you can answer a question. Why is winning so important? - and you can't use the words win/lose etc in your answer... and if you use "better" etc, please explain what you mean by that (just so you think b4 replying:).
So why does everyone still use gasoline? Simple, because the oil companies want it that way - and we are sheep.
Listening to NPR the other day, I heard this _not_very_surprising_really_ statistic about US gas consumption:
"The US uses 40% of the World's crude oil"
Putting that into perspective:
"40% of the World's crude oil is used by 4% of its population"
Your gas is less than half the price it is in Europe! And I've been watching the news here about people complaining about gas hitting 2 bucks a gallon! FFS!
Oil companies are evil. Period. They destroyed the hemp industry in the 1930's - an efficient, environmentally friendly energy source. Bastards!
"It has been proposed to provide for domestic and/or business consumers a simplified form of computer terminal by means of which information stored in a computer can be obtained from it via the public telephone network. The form of the terminal is different from a conventional computer terminal, both in the simplicity of its operation and in the form of its display."
"public telephone network"?? - Not since privatisation matey - who do they think they are kidding?
I'm reading all these comments and am surprised that nobody has mentioned the privacy issues here.
So you get your avatar scanned and it's pretty realistic? how long until there's a MI5 or NSA spider out there, patiently collecting them and collating them with our other personal data?
I'm sure they would find these very useful when cross-referenced with video footage of 'undesirables'.
The company has the target of "incubating avatars of people from 25% of US households within 6 years"
...funded by the government, no doubt;-)
just another paranoid.02
cLive;-)
AVS seems to be the next small leap for bank-kind
on
A Matter Of Trust?
·
· Score: 2
Having had to trawl through loads of cc verification stuff for my baby, I can vouch that it can be a major problem.
The transaction companies we have dealt with in the UK cover their asses by making the percentage on each transaction quite high (err, 7% I think I remember hearing for some!), but that covers you for chargebacks (insurance or something...).
When playing with Barclays ePDQ, I ended up reading the cybercash docs (basically what ePDQ is, but re-branded). They had a great feature, the Address Verification System (AVS) that didn't just take the CC number, name and expiry date, but also takes the first line of the cardholder's address and their zip/postcode for verification. You can then choose to reject transactions where either or both fail (can be problematic - 1 Main St. is not the same as 1 Main Street).
So I started looking at integrating it, but at the moment, Barclays doesn't support it. From what I can gather though, they will be soon, and when they do, the transaction fee will be less for shops that use AVS to verify cardholder's address and only allow shipping to billing address.
Of course, the easiest solution is to remove yourself from consumer culture and buy as little as possible. But then, not everyone wants to be a hippy <sigh>
I've come from non-geek background. It took me most of my twenties to work out that I get the most from work when I have to continuously learn (I get bored easily).
After a year, I thought I knew a lot. After 5 years of playing with various web languages/systems I've revised that a little;-)
I'm in no place to suggest where you should be going - a lot of that depends on your personality, your aptitude and what is important in your life.
My goals are:
to continuously learn new skills that lead towards creating cross platform solutions
to give back products and input to the community that I have learned from
to earn enough money to be able to spend time doing the other two
When you have learnt enough to realise how little you know, you're getting there (wherever that is:)
Don't learn answers, learn the right questions - the answers are easy to find when you know the right question.
As a trilogy it worked, but then it seemed you were meandering a little with the last two (IMHO;-). If you had had an inkling as to how big Hitch Hiker's guide would become, would you have made any major changes to the plots of the first three and conciously planned a five book series?
surprised the onion ain't done it yet...
on
Boo No More
·
· Score: 1
Seems like the only way we can remove the bullshit is to set an industry standardfor software version numbers. Why not just call releases by their date in the easy-perl-parse method of
yyyymmdd - eg 20000102 for today?
It would need to be a system that even the marketing people understand, so 2.6.4 would be out. Thoughts???
Slashdot Mirror
Here's a few (mostly unatributed - couldn't be bothered to tidy up) thoughts from developers on the list:
"What has, and will continue to make us successful is not just "selling boxes". we sell both a solution and a platform on which to base solutions. The developer community is a very important piece of our puzzle, and I don't see that shrinking at all with this whole Sun deal.
As for black-box - several "appliance" vendors entered the market before or close to the same time Cobalt did. Where are those black-box vendors now?
Lastly, I wanted to say that just because of the Sun deal, I'd hardly count on Cobalt going away. We now have more muscle at our disposal than we ever did before, which means better prices, better products, and better service. We have had many assurances that things will remain up to us, so long as we continue to be successful (losing money doesn't mean not being successful - building hardware isn't cheap, folks!)."
"It's not true, it's a *proposed* merger, which means it still has to be approved by the voting share holders and the board. You guys may be all for it, but it's not a done deal yet. If the acquisition goes through, it is not planned to be completed until Dec. 31. A lot can happen between now and then."
"It's gonna happen, get used to it . The stock-premium was 40% at announcement time; though I look for it to go down, 40% is hefty enough so it'll stay attractive enough to enough of the stockholders. Many of whom are employees, even top employees who were in on the deal, I'm sure (entirely my speculation; I have NO inside information). "
"Cobalt cashed in on the Linux hype. To deny otherwise would beggar reality. They may not be completely profitable yet, but they've certainly benefited from the early hype surrounding the OS."
h ttp://finnegan.metamatrix.se/emulator/get.cgi?ver= 95&url=http://www.slashdot.org
Think about it - long live napigator and gnutella et al...
1) For a competitive game to be interesting, there has to be a chance of winning (or at least not coming last ;-). To take the chess analogy further, what would the point be of me playing Karpov at chess (if I got the chance) other than for fun?
2) Contra to US soda commercials et al, winning isn't the most important part in many activities/sports. Some people actually take part because they actually like the activity. Oh yes, it would be nice to be the winner, but it's (say) a 1 in 1000 chance and life's too short.
3)In the case of D&D etc - I don't play myself, but I would guess the reward is in developing friendship and understanding with your fellow players, rather than the alienation of always wanting to win.
Finally, perhaps you can answer a question. Why is winning so important? - and you can't use the words win/lose etc in your answer... and if you use "better" etc, please explain what you mean by that (just so you think b4 replying :).
Listening to NPR the other day, I heard this _not_very_surprising_really_ statistic about US gas consumption:
"The US uses 40% of the World's crude oil"
Putting that into perspective:
"40% of the World's crude oil is used by 4% of its population"
Your gas is less than half the price it is in Europe! And I've been watching the news here about people complaining about gas hitting 2 bucks a gallon! FFS!
Oil companies are evil. Period. They destroyed the hemp industry in the 1930's - an efficient, environmentally friendly energy source. Bastards!
cLive ;-)
"public telephone network"?? - Not since privatisation matey - who do they think they are kidding?
So you get your avatar scanned and it's pretty realistic? how long until there's a MI5 or NSA spider out there, patiently collecting them and collating them with our other personal data?
I'm sure they would find these very useful when cross-referenced with video footage of 'undesirables'.
The company has the target of "incubating avatars of people from 25% of US households within 6 years"
just another paranoid .02
cLive ;-)
The transaction companies we have dealt with in the UK cover their asses by making the percentage on each transaction quite high (err, 7% I think I remember hearing for some!), but that covers you for chargebacks (insurance or something...).
When playing with Barclays ePDQ, I ended up reading the cybercash docs (basically what ePDQ is, but re-branded). They had a great feature, the Address Verification System (AVS) that didn't just take the CC number, name and expiry date, but also takes the first line of the cardholder's address and their zip/postcode for verification. You can then choose to reject transactions where either or both fail (can be problematic - 1 Main St. is not the same as 1 Main Street).
So I started looking at integrating it, but at the moment, Barclays doesn't support it. From what I can gather though, they will be soon, and when they do, the transaction fee will be less for shops that use AVS to verify cardholder's address and only allow shipping to billing address.
Of course, the easiest solution is to remove yourself from consumer culture and buy as little as possible. But then, not everyone wants to be a hippy <sigh>
I've come from non-geek background. It took me most of my twenties to work out that I get the most from work when I have to continuously learn (I get bored easily).
After a year, I thought I knew a lot. After 5 years of playing with various web languages/systems I've revised that a little ;-)
I'm in no place to suggest where you should be going - a lot of that depends on your personality, your aptitude and what is important in your life.
My goals are:
When you have learnt enough to realise how little you know, you're getting there (wherever that is :)
Don't learn answers, learn the right questions - the answers are easy to find when you know the right question.
.02
cLive ;-)
As a trilogy it worked, but then it seemed you were meandering a little with the last two (IMHO ;-). If you had had an inkling as to how big Hitch Hiker's guide would become, would you have made any major changes to the plots of the first three and conciously planned a five book series?
17 may - boo.com
18 may - boo-hoo.com
gotta be at least a -3 :)
Seems like the only way we can remove the bullshit is to set an industry standardfor software version numbers. Why not just call releases by their date in the easy-perl-parse method of
yyyymmdd - eg 20000102 for today?
It would need to be a system that even the marketing people understand, so 2.6.4 would be out. Thoughts???