You see that is what I keep thinking... I live in Canada... Hmmm, X million hectares of nothingness is now converted into farmland. Wow, could be interesting. Bring on the global warning I say!!!!;)
Well it is interesting to see the semi-demise of a once great company.
I do not see this as anti-piracy, but money making squezze. If one reads the article they will notice that OEM's and large corporates still get "normal" license. This means a professional pirate can still continue on. However the normal user will be shafted. This means that anyone who has multiple computers or replaced a computer will automatically need to buy multiple licenses. So in effect we have a money making scheme.
But MS is forgetting something, I tried to explain this concept to my mother and she looked at me really puzzled. You see she is about to buy a notebook for when she visits the kids. She does not see the point of buying two copies of Office. As a result she considered using LINUX because she saw some pictures at CNN where it looked ok. And her decision was made out of principle, which in my eyes is dangerous for MS.
You know after looking at the MS trial, and other fiascos, one really wonders where management is!!!
I know tons of people have replied, but I would like to add my two bits. I think it will be especially helpful since I have gone through your scenario.
First let me state that I am a German, who was raised and educated in Canada and the US. About 7 years ago my wife and I decided after university to tour Europe. We did so as contractors. The places we went to were England, Germany, France and Switzerland. BTW as reference we just moved back.
Ok so what did I learn? First if you are not an EU citzen you WILL HAVE a hard time. France as you mentioned will be the most difficult. We lived for 1.5 years on the French Riveria. And my wife who is Canadian had a very hard time getting her papers. The problem was that they ignored her marriage to me. Once I bluntly pointed this out things went faster. Once you are in France WATCH out. You pay through the teeth in taxes and social costs. For example in France social costs are 40% of your income. After that you pay income tax. This means after all is done and said you will in the IT industry pay about 60% to the government. Unless you like the French lifestyle, which I LOVE, avoid France like the plague.
Next, the UK IT market is great. People are friendly, tax situation will result in about American level tax rates. However, the problem you will have is that as an American you will not be able to contract. This means you pay WILL SUCK!!!! And you will get very little social benefits. We left the UK because of the bad weather.
Germany is a good IT market. The pay is pretty good and tax situation is bearable for a social country. However be forewarned Germans are an exact society. Once you are used to it you will wonder how the rest of the world actually functions. When my wife and I moved back we were appalled at how inefficient things are in Canada. But this efficiency comes at the cost that Germans can seem very cold!!! BTW Germany is right now offering the "green card" program. This means you can get a five year permit, which is identical to an H1B.
Italy, great country, but "corrupt". I have some friends and did some work there. Love the food, love the people, but would never open a company there.
And finally Switzerland. This is IT heaven!!! Great wages, low taxes and the country works like clock work. This is one of my favourite countries. Why did we leave? Simple getting a permit to stay in Switzerland beyond 5 years is very difficult. The way I like to phrase it is that Switzerland endures foreigners for extended stays, but you return to your own country. Unless of course you happen to have a few millions lying around. Then "welcome to switzerland". Again though Switzerland is my favourite countracting country and if I could stay there I would.
What is the overall impression? First as an American be prepared for the difference of opinion. In other words if you can relate to Gore, you will have no problems in Europe. If however you are a Bush person, forget you will have battles and you will go home saying "Europe what a f****d place". Europe is a social continent and having mainly grown up in Canada have no problem with socialism.
Would I go to Europe again? In a dime, but life has taken me back to Canada. Just get corporate support and enjoy life!!!!
Nice thought... dweeb... How come you are an AC? Hmm, maybe you are doing some illegal????
Seriously though. Being anonymous should be allowed. What I do is my own business and not for the government to know. And being able to trace an identity will not track down a criminal. Remember in the good old days of telephone tracing. Well the mob talk in code and got nothing from the phone calls.
This is yet another example of the US wanting to spy on people...
The business community works by making it interesting to make money. Regardless of how it is spun, in the end everyone needs money.
The reason why many open source projects work and continue to survive is because they offer
1) better quality 2) respect the business community 3) listen to their clients
Here are examples of this in action, Linux, Apache and Perl. Each of these three projects do not attempt to force the world to open source. They do their thing and let the business community be as it is.
To be quite honest I would think a VAT or Open Source society tax should be started. Companies that profit from Open Source should be required to donate some money to the Open Source community. The Open Source community would then spread that money to developers working on Open Source projects.
I know this sounds socialist, but I think the Open Source community as a whole would benefit. I would even ammend the GPL as follows.
"If you intend to not distribute the sources to this project, then you are required to donate a reasonable amount of the profts back into the Open Source community."
As much as the Open Source community hates this, but it makes a business of Open Source. Instead this will make interesting for the business community to use the vast number of sources available. And if the business community does use the sources then the Open Source community will benefit. The Open Source community can then continue and do their favourite thing, hack at code...
I think it is a very attractive business model. A small business could compete against the big players. To be quite frank this is a great way of breaking the hold of the big software companies on the software community.
If you think that this will only attract leeches and pirates, think again. Developing a product is one thing. Making it stable, creating effective documentation, creating a marketing campaign, providing extensive support is quite a bit of work and should not be underestimated. And as we all know, this part of the work sucks!!!
I live in Europe, supposedly the land of wireless technology. And yes wireless does many things for me that a PC cannot. BUT and this is a big BUT, wireless also does MANY things that my PC cannot. Wireless will not replace my PC, it may supplement it...
Here are some problems with wireless devices. Ever try to do your email on a telephone? It is painful and uncomfortable. Ever try to do calender stuff on a wireless device? Again very painful. The problem is the form factor. And giving the device voice capabilities will not help. The reason being is because with everyone talking it will be pure hell... Even now in Europe there are no-handy (cell phone) zones because people do not want you talking like a maniac. Think about it this, (ok it is a hypthetical comparison), but in Star Trek people only use voice for general operations. People still use a tablet to do most of their work.
Instead what I think will make a big impact are notebooks. More and more I find myself purchasing a notebook instead of a desktop PC. Hence the transmeta folks got it right by targetting the notebook market.
The reason why a notebook will become indispensible is because you will want your word processor and your spreadsheet etc, etc... A web version of a word processor is nothing but a toy. A web based word processor can only be used to write a very simple note, nothing more. The problem lies in the fact that people add comments, style sheets to documents which a simple word processor cannot handle. With a notebook you have everything and a local storage device to boot. It is the ultimate travel device.
I also think the Windows CE subnote books (HP Jornada) are the ultimate simple notebook. They have everything you need, turn on instantely like an electronic appliance, form factor allows it to be used regularly and are dead simple to use!!!
This ruling sucks big time!!! And I am disgusted that the courts let it through. You see I am a contractor, consultant, etc. And yes I and my wife have worked in this field for a longer period of time (eight years). And yes WE LIKE IT LIKE THIS.
A contractor is a contractor, is a contractor and not an employee. And if you agree to the contractor priniciples then you stick to it and not decide to change your mind.
Personally I think this is an incidence of sour grapes because the employees made more money through stocks. My comment is why the people never applied for jobs in the first place.
And if they were not happy with the situation, why did they not change it... But not in the form of sueing, which is a bit easy.
AOL was NOT THE FIRST TO JUMP ON THE INTERNET BANDWAGON. AOL held out pretty good until they saw that they had to jump on the Internet Bandwagon.
You know I bet you that in about year, Steve Case will be saying. "Folks to make the Internet work, we need to add a few tweaks. They are simple, but because of the investment involved it will be only available on the AOL network."
Windows NT was originally based on the server concept that Hurd promotes. However, performance and lack of it forced the designers of NT to move back to a monolithic design.
Another problem is the lack of interest in this approach. Sure it is cool from a computer science approach, but the reality is that it is not that useful. For example the POSIX system and OS2 system was to be expanded. But because of political and interest reasons those things just were not extended.
Remember the big multi-CPU support plan for NT? Well time has shown there is no interest. The people want Intel.
So while the Hurd concept is neat, the long term will be that it is not something that is useful. Unless HURD does things that other OS's cannot do. Then maybe this approach will win over.
Sorry, but I have to throw this problem at the website developers themselves. When we develop Web Server sites that contain credit-cards, we make sure that the database server cannot be accessed from the outside world. And we make sure that credit card information travels one way only, from client to database. Only internal networks can see the credit card information. We trust physical hardware limitations, not software limitations...
It was funny, a couple of days I was thinking exactly the same thing that was said in the report. It is not that Linux will not do well, but investors and the likes were "bored" this year. The only interesting thing was Linux. Java, passe, Windows nothing...
In 2000 the big thing will be Windows 2000. Lets be clear on one thing folks. MS is a company with 30,000 employees and worth over 500 billion. So a release of their OS will be a BIG deal.
But it does present an opportunity for Linux. During the wave of Windows 2000 the problems pointed out this year can be solved. And they can be solved in some peace and quite. Once the wave of Windows 2000 has died off then Linux can roll its own waves again.
Remember a marathon is not won by running as fast as you can. It is won by pacing yourself...
Take the situation of filing a patent in the US. And then you talk about the technology. At that moment the European Patent applications becomes invalid. European Patent applications do not care whether you have filed in the US. The point is that once it is public and no patent has been filed, it become automatically invalid.
The reason I ask is if the search routine can be patented is because it has been three years in the development and most likely already made public previously. Remember with worldwide patents you may not make any disclosure and with American only six months are allowed.
And the other question is I did some research and found an interesting link http://www.cise.ufl.edu/~lw0/research/papers/p09/i ndex.htm. Why I found this interesting is because funding was partially provided by DARPA and NASA. Does this not mean that this stuff cannot be patented? I thought there was a clause that when either DARPA or NASA provided funding it should be for the common good...
>Should we even do this? Do we really want to change things to make it easier for EVERYONE (read: computer illerate)?
Excuse me, I am far from being computer illerate and yet I find the X configuration a royal pain in the ass. And I do not feel like digging out the manuals just so that X will work. What I usually end up doing is setting up a Linux box and then running X on a Windows box.
Sorry as much as I love Linux. I also like money. It does not have to be stinking rich money. But money none-the-less. Sure helps to pay for everything...
Christian
While it may be nice there is still an issue
on
KDE 2.0 in Action
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· Score: 1
While KDE 2.0 may be nice, etc, etc...
It still leaves the problem of the QT licensing. I know, I know... But last week I was at SD EAST and asked when they would be decreasing their licensing fees for commercial software. Their answer was "We need to live too!" (In a very snooty voice). Well excuse me!
I like Linux, even gave some Linux talks at SD. And I had the chance to talk to a few people about Linux. For Linux to attract the widest array of developers for the desktop they need to attract all developers. And the ones who cannot afford 2K USD are the shareware developers or small company.
And to be honest I find it disgusting considering companies like them charge so much, when companies like Cygnus charge only 199 USD for a development environment.
I have ranted and raved and until the commercial license changes I will not even look at KDE.
I find this tit-tat issue funny. DOES IT REALLY MATTER? For example while they mention that the Zeus server has the same problem, at least there is a choice on Linux.
NT is a good OS. And yes IIS is a good Web Server. But there is NO CHOICE!!! And that to me is a bigger problem.
You see problems can be fixed in both Linux and in Apache. But what happens if there is a problem in NT and IIS? Can I switch Web Servers? Not easily. Can I fix IIS? Not at all.
Slashdot Mirror
Free????? Sorry, but libraries in France are not all free. My wife actually had to pay (ok it was small). BTW this was about 6 months ago.
You see that is what I keep thinking... I live in Canada... Hmmm, X million hectares of nothingness is now converted into farmland. Wow, could be interesting. Bring on the global warning I say!!!! ;)
Well it is interesting to see the semi-demise of a once great company.
I do not see this as anti-piracy, but money making squezze. If one reads the article they will notice that OEM's and large corporates still get "normal" license. This means a professional pirate can still continue on. However the normal user will be shafted. This means that anyone who has multiple computers or replaced a computer will automatically need to buy multiple licenses. So in effect we have a money making scheme.
But MS is forgetting something, I tried to explain this concept to my mother and she looked at me really puzzled. You see she is about to buy a notebook for when she visits the kids. She does not see the point of buying two copies of Office. As a result she considered using LINUX because she saw some pictures at CNN where it looked ok. And her decision was made out of principle, which in my eyes is dangerous for MS.
You know after looking at the MS trial, and other fiascos, one really wonders where management is!!!
Bravo MS keep it up!!!!
I know tons of people have replied, but I would like to add my two bits. I think it will be especially helpful since I have gone through your scenario.
First let me state that I am a German, who was raised and educated in Canada and the US. About 7 years ago my wife and I decided after university to tour Europe. We did so as contractors. The places we went to were England, Germany, France and Switzerland. BTW as reference we just moved back.
Ok so what did I learn? First if you are not an EU citzen you WILL HAVE a hard time. France as you mentioned will be the most difficult. We lived for 1.5 years on the French Riveria. And my wife who is Canadian had a very hard time getting her papers. The problem was that they ignored her marriage to me. Once I bluntly pointed this out things went faster. Once you are in France WATCH out. You pay through the teeth in taxes and social costs. For example in France social costs are 40% of your income. After that you pay income tax. This means after all is done and said you will in the IT industry pay about 60% to the government. Unless you like the French lifestyle, which I LOVE, avoid France like the plague.
Next, the UK IT market is great. People are friendly, tax situation will result in about American level tax rates. However, the problem you will have is that as an American you will not be able to contract. This means you pay WILL SUCK!!!! And you will get very little social benefits. We left the UK because of the bad weather.
Germany is a good IT market. The pay is pretty good and tax situation is bearable for a social country. However be forewarned Germans are an exact society. Once you are used to it you will wonder how the rest of the world actually functions. When my wife and I moved back we were appalled at how inefficient things are in Canada. But this efficiency comes at the cost that Germans can seem very cold!!! BTW Germany is right now offering the "green card" program. This means you can get a five year permit, which is identical to an H1B.
Italy, great country, but "corrupt". I have some friends and did some work there. Love the food, love the people, but would never open a company there.
And finally Switzerland. This is IT heaven!!! Great wages, low taxes and the country works like clock work. This is one of my favourite countries. Why did we leave? Simple getting a permit to stay in Switzerland beyond 5 years is very difficult. The way I like to phrase it is that Switzerland endures foreigners for extended stays, but you return to your own country. Unless of course you happen to have a few millions lying around. Then "welcome to switzerland". Again though Switzerland is my favourite countracting country and if I could stay there I would.
What is the overall impression? First as an American be prepared for the difference of opinion. In other words if you can relate to Gore, you will have no problems in Europe. If however you are a Bush person, forget you will have battles and you will go home saying "Europe what a f****d place". Europe is a social continent and having mainly grown up in Canada have no problem with socialism.
Would I go to Europe again? In a dime, but life has taken me back to Canada. Just get corporate support and enjoy life!!!!
And if you happen to have a boat load of money for support then QT is what you want...
Really though I do like wxWindows or GTK with the C++ wrappers. Use that with CodeFusion from Cygnus and you have a pretty good environment
Nice thought... dweeb... How come you are an AC? Hmm, maybe you are doing some illegal????
Seriously though. Being anonymous should be allowed. What I do is my own business and not for the government to know. And being able to trace an identity will not track down a criminal. Remember in the good old days of telephone tracing. Well the mob talk in code and got nothing from the phone calls.
This is yet another example of the US wanting to spy on people...
The business community works by making it interesting to make money. Regardless of how it is spun, in the end everyone needs money.
The reason why many open source projects work and continue to survive is because they offer
1) better quality
2) respect the business community
3) listen to their clients
Here are examples of this in action, Linux, Apache and Perl. Each of these three projects do not attempt to force the world to open source. They do their thing and let the business community be as it is.
To be quite honest I would think a VAT or Open Source society tax should be started. Companies that profit from Open Source should be required to donate some money to the Open Source community. The Open Source community would then spread that money to developers working on Open Source projects.
I know this sounds socialist, but I think the Open Source community as a whole would benefit. I would even ammend the GPL as follows.
"If you intend to not distribute the sources to this project, then you are required to donate a reasonable amount of the profts back into the Open Source community."
As much as the Open Source community hates this, but it makes a business of Open Source. Instead this will make interesting for the business community to use the vast number of sources available. And if the business community does use the sources then the Open Source community will benefit. The Open Source community can then continue and do their favourite thing, hack at code...
I think it is a very attractive business model. A small business could compete against the big players. To be quite frank this is a great way of breaking the hold of the big software companies on the software community.
If you think that this will only attract leeches and pirates, think again. Developing a product is one thing. Making it stable, creating effective documentation, creating a marketing campaign, providing extensive support is quite a bit of work and should not be underestimated. And as we all know, this part of the work sucks!!!
I live in Europe, supposedly the land of wireless technology. And yes wireless does many things for me that a PC cannot. BUT and this is a big BUT, wireless also does MANY things that my PC cannot. Wireless will not replace my PC, it may supplement it...
Here are some problems with wireless devices. Ever try to do your email on a telephone? It is painful and uncomfortable. Ever try to do calender stuff on a wireless device? Again very painful. The problem is the form factor. And giving the device voice capabilities will not help. The reason being is because with everyone talking it will be pure hell... Even now in Europe there are no-handy (cell phone) zones because people do not want you talking like a maniac. Think about it this, (ok it is a hypthetical comparison), but in Star Trek people only use voice for general operations. People still use a tablet to do most of their work.
Instead what I think will make a big impact are notebooks. More and more I find myself purchasing a notebook instead of a desktop PC. Hence the transmeta folks got it right by targetting the notebook market.
The reason why a notebook will become indispensible is because you will want your word processor and your spreadsheet etc, etc... A web version of a word processor is nothing but a toy. A web based word processor can only be used to write a very simple note, nothing more. The problem lies in the fact that people add comments, style sheets to documents which a simple word processor cannot handle. With a notebook you have everything and a local storage device to boot. It is the ultimate travel device.
I also think the Windows CE subnote books (HP Jornada) are the ultimate simple notebook. They have everything you need, turn on instantely like an electronic appliance, form factor allows it to be used regularly and are dead simple to use!!!
This ruling sucks big time!!! And I am disgusted that the courts let it through. You see I am a contractor, consultant, etc. And yes I and my wife have worked in this field for a longer period of time (eight years). And yes WE LIKE IT LIKE THIS.
A contractor is a contractor, is a contractor and not an employee. And if you agree to the contractor priniciples then you stick to it and not decide to change your mind.
Personally I think this is an incidence of sour grapes because the employees made more money through stocks. My comment is why the people never applied for jobs in the first place.
And if they were not happy with the situation, why did they not change it... But not in the form of sueing, which is a bit easy.
AOL was NOT THE FIRST TO JUMP ON THE INTERNET BANDWAGON. AOL held out pretty good until they saw that they had to jump on the Internet Bandwagon.
You know I bet you that in about year, Steve Case will be saying. "Folks to make the Internet work, we need to add a few tweaks. They are simple, but because of the investment involved it will be only available on the AOL network."
Windows NT was originally based on the server concept that Hurd promotes. However, performance and lack of it forced the designers of NT to move back to a monolithic design.
Another problem is the lack of interest in this approach. Sure it is cool from a computer science approach, but the reality is that it is not that useful. For example the POSIX system and OS2 system was to be expanded. But because of political and interest reasons those things just were not extended.
Remember the big multi-CPU support plan for NT? Well time has shown there is no interest. The people want Intel.
So while the Hurd concept is neat, the long term will be that it is not something that is useful. Unless HURD does things that other OS's cannot do. Then maybe this approach will win over.
Oddly enough you are right. Ever heard of the transputer....
It did what you were talking about right in the chip. And it was a parallel processing chip.
Sadly it died... Broke my heart...
Sorry, but I have to throw this problem at the website developers themselves. When we develop Web Server sites that contain credit-cards, we make sure that the database server cannot be accessed from the outside world. And we make sure that credit card information travels one way only, from client to database. Only internal networks can see the credit card information. We trust physical hardware limitations, not software limitations...
...
It was funny, a couple of days I was thinking exactly the same thing that was said in the report. It is not that Linux will not do well, but investors and the likes were "bored" this year. The only interesting thing was Linux. Java, passe, Windows nothing...
In 2000 the big thing will be Windows 2000. Lets be clear on one thing folks. MS is a company with 30,000 employees and worth over 500 billion. So a release of their OS will be a BIG deal.
But it does present an opportunity for Linux. During the wave of Windows 2000 the problems pointed out this year can be solved. And they can be solved in some peace and quite. Once the wave of Windows 2000 has died off then Linux can roll its own waves again.
Remember a marathon is not won by running as fast as you can. It is won by pacing yourself...
I think the question of why Linux is more popular than BSD should not be over-emphasized. You could argue this point over that point.
But it really is being at the right place at the right time. Linus is a popular person who has a good personality. People LIKE HIM...
It is like asking why Microsoft is more popular than Apple or UNIX. Microsoft was at the right place at the right time.
Take the situation of filing a patent in the US. And then you talk about the technology. At that moment the European Patent applications becomes invalid. European Patent applications do not care whether you have filed in the US. The point is that once it is public and no patent has been filed, it become automatically invalid.
The reason I ask is if the search routine can be patented is because it has been three years in the development and most likely already made public previously. Remember with worldwide patents you may not make any disclosure and with American only six months are allowed.
i ndex.htm. Why I found this interesting is because funding was partially provided by DARPA and NASA. Does this not mean that this stuff cannot be patented? I thought there was a clause that when either DARPA or NASA provided funding it should be for the common good...
And the other question is I did some research and found an interesting link http://www.cise.ufl.edu/~lw0/research/papers/p09/
Just some thoughts...
Exactly! People seem to forget this fact. From knowing MS very well, MS has tha attitude that if it works leave it.
Sure they tried to convert to NT, but it failed. And once that happens management within MS takes the attitude that you keep what works.
People tend to forget Microsoft is in the money game and not the idealism game...
>Should we even do this? Do we really want to change things to make it easier for EVERYONE (read: computer illerate)?
Excuse me, I am far from being computer illerate and yet I find the X configuration a royal pain in the ass. And I do not feel like digging out the manuals just so that X will work. What I usually end up doing is setting up a Linux box and then running X on a Windows box.
Beeep, wrong answer...
Have your ever heard of Visual Basic???? It is the Cobol of tomorrow...
Sorry as much as I love Linux. I also like money. It does not have to be stinking rich money. But money none-the-less. Sure helps to pay for everything...
Christian
While KDE 2.0 may be nice, etc, etc...
It still leaves the problem of the QT licensing. I know, I know... But last week I was at SD EAST and asked when they would be decreasing their licensing fees for commercial software. Their answer was "We need to live too!" (In a very snooty voice). Well excuse me!
I like Linux, even gave some Linux talks at SD. And I had the chance to talk to a few people about Linux. For Linux to attract the widest array of developers for the desktop they need to attract all developers. And the ones who cannot afford 2K USD are the shareware developers or small company.
And to be honest I find it disgusting considering companies like them charge so much, when companies like Cygnus charge only 199 USD for a development environment.
I have ranted and raved and until the commercial license changes I will not even look at KDE.
It seems strange that they would be announcing things on January 19, 2000. Is this a play on numbers?
I find this tit-tat issue funny. DOES IT REALLY MATTER? For example while they mention that the Zeus server has the same problem, at least there is a choice on Linux.
NT is a good OS. And yes IIS is a good Web Server. But there is NO CHOICE!!! And that to me is a bigger problem.
You see problems can be fixed in both Linux and in Apache. But what happens if there is a problem in NT and IIS? Can I switch Web Servers? Not easily. Can I fix IIS? Not at all.