>This is not the time for a company to be picking this sort of fight.
Naah, it's exactly the right time to be picking such a fight.
When the job market is tight, pretty much any employer can lay off 10% of the workforce, and tell the rest to work harder. If you don't like it, leave.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
Eventually things will break, because while you can do more with less to some extent, keep cutting and eventually things WILL break. The workers left haven't the resources to do it right, they're cutting corners, running on luck, a wing, and a prayer. Of course when it does break, blame the workers, lay them all off, reset the schedule with a new team overseas. Assuming all of your competitors are pulling similar stunts, the resulting delays won't even set you that far behind, because it's happening to everyone.
I look at corporate stupidity around here, and realize that a truly well-run company could mop the floor with them, assuming it could get well-launched. There must be some sort of systemic barriers to entry, or self-stultifying aspect to a growing company, that this hasn't already happened.
So many people rail against government stupidity. I won't argue that there isn't plenty of it to go around, I'll just argue that the government has no monopoly whatsoever on stupidity - there's plenty of it in the corporate world.
(This is all hearsay, nothing authoritiative, beyond what was published)
Heck, you don't need to stop there. The Romp CPU in the RT-PC and the processor in the RISC-6000 both had "inverted page tables" that make extremely large virtual address space - which is what we're really talking about here, practical. In fact in the early days, non-x86 AIX had a traditional filesystem layered on top of "persistent store". That odd model is part of why memory management on the RS-6000 was such an oddball.
I don't know if any of this stuff survived into the PowerPC, or if they adopted more traditional memory management hardware. (and software layers on top of that)
For that matter, the persistent store concepts predate System/38 by a considerable margin. Google "ibm future system".
I do it on the command line - sometime in the next week or so I'll be putting Gentoo on my new machine. No clicks, all tappity-tappity on the keyboard.
Installation time is only important if you have to do it often, or are scared to do it at all.
Boot and run time are a different matter. On that topic, I know that Windows has pulled stunts (Don't know if Linux might have - I do know that gdm/xdm is NOT the last thing in the boot sequence.) in the past to get a visible desktop faster, even though it's not truly usable yet. They were playing to perception. I wonder how you know when you've got a usable desktop, of if that last bit of delay gets tucked into the first application first-time-after-boot start time.
I read an article in the past year about a different "sixth sense" experiment. They made a belt of cellphone-type vibrators, then controlled them such that the northmost vibrator was activated. In essence a built-in compass. Subjects quit noticing the vibration after a few days. Within a few weeks, they had "perfect direction," and it wasn't just the ability to point north, or any other particular direction. Their sense of distance, position, etc, were all much better. The big point of the experiment was to see if an adult brain could internalize and integrate the new information source.
It could.
I want one.
Though it occasionally abandons me, I generally have a very good sense of direction. Let me study a map, get oriented, and I can usually get you there. I can usually give bearing and distance to an arbitrary destination in the general area. But I'd like my sense of direction to be PERFECT. (or darned close to it)
Incidentally, the effects persisted for several weeks after the device was removed.
There's also talk about a magnetic grain embedded in the heads of some animals. They've studied the grain, and found that it's the largest size that can naturally be a single magnetic domain. Smaller, and it gives less "signal". Larger, and it splits into multiple domains, and again gives less signal. Sounds like a natural magnetic compass to me. Maybe there's a little bit of residual prewiring in the human brain for such a directional sense, which is why the vibrator belt experiment worked so well.
NOW you've done it. Now TSA is going to start checking us all for clocks and bags in the security lines. Let's just hope nobody comes up with exploding underwear. (with a nod to one of the entries to Bruce Schneier's annual "Movie Plot Terrorist Threat" contest.)
Does anyone think that the calls for "One True Distribution" are perhaps a misguided attempt to compete with Microsoft by looking more like Microsoft?
Does anyone really think that moving onto Microsoft's playing field would help Linux compete? At the very least, it gives them one target to focus their FUD and legal machines at.
The first AthlonXP box I set up, I called "Andretti" because it was FAST! Of course now it's the slowest non-server in the house. My servers are all ancient cast-offs or flea market retreads. (Running RAID-1, of course.)
Another comment on tax cuts, but on business tax cuts...
The point is to "give" (or not take away) business money so they will invest it. But in today's market, the problem is a lack of demand. So ANY business will see that they currently have excess capacity, and there is absolutely no point in investing in equipment - in fact they would generally be stupid to do so. In today's climate, if business got some extra money, the smart thing to do would be to sack it away, reduce debt, or go looking for mergers or acquisitions. Guess what - the "business improvements" of consolidations really mean eliminiating "redundancies", a fancy way of saying that they can cut staff.
In other words, in the current market, cutting taxes for businesses will make the problem worse by putting more people out of jobs.
This really hits the point in more ways than you say.
Why is the OS "an important non-commodity product" that needs to be repurchased every few years?
In this respect, stow the "waiting for it to compile" jokes for half a minute, and take a look at Gentoo Linux. Gentoo has releases, but they're no big deal. By and large, you just keep your software up-to-date, and that's it. Every now and then there's a big and obnoxious change, like gcc, glibc, or xorg major revisions, and some pain in dealing with it. But most of the time you just stay up-to-date, and occasionally add or remove software as your needs change.
No upgrades, no need to reinstall, no muss, no fuss.
In the commercial software world, this would be equivalent to "service packs forever," and occasionally the opportunity to purchase or perhaps be given new "features" to take advantage of new hardware or software developments.
The revenue story need not be all bad with this model, either. In addition to "features" you could purchase "skins" and other add-ons to personalized your own system. This might sound like a horrendous testing and software reliability nightmare, but perhaps if the programming interfaces were better designed it might well be more reliable.
But the core problem is that Microsoft has been keeping the OS one of a very few non-commodity parts in a PC, one of the very few profitable parts of the box. In order to sustain that model, they have to keep revamping it every few years. In order to keep people purchasing the NEW! version they have to CHANGE! enough things that people feel they're getting their money's worth.
Yeah, but Machiavelli is in the same club with Nero, Caligula, etc. Maybe not in the same circle of that club, but the same club nonetheless. Not a good way to be remembered.
Of course these days it appears that Putin is trying to move Stalin from that same club into a more respectable one.
Does this mean that we have to retire the number "6"?
Now we'll have to adjust our educational cirricula to have kids learn to count, 1-2-3-4-5-7-8-9-etc. Think of the updates to computers that will be required. This will be worse than Y2K, worst than the recent changes to DST rules, worse than the leap second!
are government and corporate interests that don't like the "leveling" effects of the internet. In eventual effect, how different is a DDOS attack from a Great Firewall. (not necessarily "of China") I know DDOS and filtering have different immediate effects, but I'm thinking of the social and political utility here, as well.
Today my wife/daughter had "I Love Lucy" playing (VitaMeataVegamin) and the crawl kept up the whole time, about the channel being dropped if you were a Time Warner customer, etc.
We've had corporate warfare playing on our computers now for decades - I guess it's time it made its way to our TV sets. The typical computer is a mishmash of a Microsoft OS, this company's free trial for this software, that company's free trial for that software, etc. Then we find out that this software doesn't play well with that software, and the next OS upgrade doesn't play well with either. It's corporate warfare, and the battleground they're fighting on is our computers.
For that matter, there have been several Internet outages as companies "negotiate" peering agreements.
Now it's moving to our TV sets, too.
AT this juncture it's a good idea to remember that apparently we are consumers, not customers. Our role in life is to give them our money, in exchange for whatever they deign to give us in return. Their agendas are apparently more important than delivering goods and services that discerning customers (What the heck are those?!?) want and are willing to pay for.
But to read the report, it sounds almost as if they want to fix the restraints, and change the pressure suit procedures... so they can suffer more??? I know, they're looking to make "slightly less catastrophic" incidents survivable.
> I'm willing to bet that if everyone who *REALLY* wants to see great F/OSS > drivers for ATI were to plop down $5 USD
I was perhaps thinking of making this an "Ask Slashdot" question, breaking my years-long moratorium on ever bothering to try to submit something to them, again. I'm sure micropayment questions are a dup, but an occasional dump on their current state would be nice to have.
How do I dump $5 on someone?
I don't give out my credit card number freely. I don't like PayPal - they really, really, really want my bank account number for a direct feed. I know there are ways to get around that, but I just don't want to deal with people so interested in getting into my funds. I'd like someone who operates kind of like EZ-Pass - I initiate a credit card transaction to give them a balance every so often, and then I can spend from that balance. No bank account tap, no ongoing credit card tap.
Somewhere up-thread there was a remark that the developer would like an HDMI-audio-capable monitor so he could debug that part of the code, so he could us a bunch of us chipping in $5 ea.
I'd be careful on that definition of "slow." I watched IBM's decline, and at the time certain parts seemed quite precipitous. Every now and then there are inflection points, for example where network effects were working in your favor, and then those same network effects turn against you. Plus sometimes the outlook on a situation changes, and being "properly diversified" turns into "the death of a thousand paper-cuts" almost overnight.
Nor do I think Microsoft will die. At some point I expect them to tread the road trod decades ago by IBM, with the same pain. But guess what, IBM is still with us, and I expect to Microsoft to be, as well. But IBM no longer dictates what the industry does, and I expect the same thing to happen to Microsoft. Furthermore, the industry benefited when IBM stopped dictating, and I expect the same types of benefits when Microsoft is no longer able to.
As you say, my daughter's Ubuntu machine plays perfectly nicely with my Gentoo infrastructure, and my son's WinXP machine does too, for that matter. I'll presume that my daughter's boyfriend's Mac will plug into my network and run just fine, whenever that becomes necessary.
It all runs on standards - real, open, cross-platform, public standards.
You're absolutely right! On the desktop, Microsoft is IT, and will be IT forever! The big I.T. news of the year 3008 will be yet another Windows migration, how many will advise waiting a year until the first service pack is out. Of course NEXT year - 3009 - will be the year of the Linux desktop.
After all, contrary to what Lester Throeau says, present trends WILL continue. 3008 will look just like 2008, simply further along Moore's law, poorer health coverage at greater premiums, nation never more divided, etc.
Nice idea, one problem is that they have a very big gun that shoots lawyers, and you have only your own financial resources. The courts really aren't fair, for that reason. That's really what the RIAA has been doing, and with a few notable exceptions, they've been making out very well at it - except in the court of public opinion.
Another problem is EULA - really what they represent - companies shooting lawyers at you, in another form. Some time read "Good Omens" by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman and see what they have to say about software licenses/contracts/warranties.
They didn't fail miserably - they succeeded wildly! They got $200,000,000,000 in your tax dollars and mine, and didn't have to deliver a thing but double-talk. If I were a greedy SOB of a stockholder or executive with no sense of personal ethics, I'd pick that as THE business model to emulate.
As the doctor in "Life and Death" near the beginning of the game you would occasionally get "paged," and have to refer to a little cardboard gizmo to give the right response. Obviously a variation of the "manual page/rotating paper disk" mentioned earlier. A bit tougher/more annoying because it wasn't up-front, just a few random times early in the game.
But now Vista is OK, so Heaven forfend! Don't even think about migrating to one of those other platforms like Mac or Linux. All you need to do with (Insert latest Microsoft platform here.) is wait about a year until SP1 or SP2 comes out, and then it'll be great. Of course by that time the next Microsoft platform is on it's way, but you just need to wait until it's a bit over a year old, too.
Remember, for any other platform, problems like this are a reason to flee back to Microsoft. But for a Microsoft platform, it's obvious that you just wait a year, but new up-to-date hardware, and all will be fine.
Aren't double-standards great, especially when most people don't recognize them as such?
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>This is not the time for a company to be picking this sort of fight.
Naah, it's exactly the right time to be picking such a fight.
When the job market is tight, pretty much any employer can lay off 10% of the workforce, and tell the rest to work harder. If you don't like it, leave.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
Eventually things will break, because while you can do more with less to some extent, keep cutting and eventually things WILL break. The workers left haven't the resources to do it right, they're cutting corners, running on luck, a wing, and a prayer. Of course when it does break, blame the workers, lay them all off, reset the schedule with a new team overseas. Assuming all of your competitors are pulling similar stunts, the resulting delays won't even set you that far behind, because it's happening to everyone.
I look at corporate stupidity around here, and realize that a truly well-run company could mop the floor with them, assuming it could get well-launched. There must be some sort of systemic barriers to entry, or self-stultifying aspect to a growing company, that this hasn't already happened.
So many people rail against government stupidity. I won't argue that there isn't plenty of it to go around, I'll just argue that the government has no monopoly whatsoever on stupidity - there's plenty of it in the corporate world.
(This is all hearsay, nothing authoritiative, beyond what was published)
Heck, you don't need to stop there. The Romp CPU in the RT-PC and the processor in the RISC-6000 both had "inverted page tables" that make extremely large virtual address space - which is what we're really talking about here, practical. In fact in the early days, non-x86 AIX had a traditional filesystem layered on top of "persistent store". That odd model is part of why memory management on the RS-6000 was such an oddball.
I don't know if any of this stuff survived into the PowerPC, or if they adopted more traditional memory management hardware. (and software layers on top of that)
For that matter, the persistent store concepts predate System/38 by a considerable margin. Google "ibm future system".
I don't click to install, you insensitive clod!
I do it on the command line - sometime in the next week or so I'll be putting Gentoo on my new machine. No clicks, all tappity-tappity on the keyboard.
Installation time is only important if you have to do it often, or are scared to do it at all.
Boot and run time are a different matter. On that topic, I know that Windows has pulled stunts (Don't know if Linux might have - I do know that gdm/xdm is NOT the last thing in the boot sequence.) in the past to get a visible desktop faster, even though it's not truly usable yet. They were playing to perception. I wonder how you know when you've got a usable desktop, of if that last bit of delay gets tucked into the first application first-time-after-boot start time.
I read an article in the past year about a different "sixth sense" experiment. They made a belt of cellphone-type vibrators, then controlled them such that the northmost vibrator was activated. In essence a built-in compass. Subjects quit noticing the vibration after a few days. Within a few weeks, they had "perfect direction," and it wasn't just the ability to point north, or any other particular direction. Their sense of distance, position, etc, were all much better. The big point of the experiment was to see if an adult brain could internalize and integrate the new information source.
It could.
I want one.
Though it occasionally abandons me, I generally have a very good sense of direction. Let me study a map, get oriented, and I can usually get you there. I can usually give bearing and distance to an arbitrary destination in the general area. But I'd like my sense of direction to be PERFECT. (or darned close to it)
Incidentally, the effects persisted for several weeks after the device was removed.
There's also talk about a magnetic grain embedded in the heads of some animals. They've studied the grain, and found that it's the largest size that can naturally be a single magnetic domain. Smaller, and it gives less "signal". Larger, and it splits into multiple domains, and again gives less signal. Sounds like a natural magnetic compass to me. Maybe there's a little bit of residual prewiring in the human brain for such a directional sense, which is why the vibrator belt experiment worked so well.
NOW you've done it. Now TSA is going to start checking us all for clocks and bags in the security lines. Let's just hope nobody comes up with exploding underwear. (with a nod to one of the entries to Bruce Schneier's annual "Movie Plot Terrorist Threat" contest.)
Does anyone think that the calls for "One True Distribution" are perhaps a misguided attempt to compete with Microsoft by looking more like Microsoft?
Does anyone really think that moving onto Microsoft's playing field would help Linux compete? At the very least, it gives them one target to focus their FUD and legal machines at.
The first AthlonXP box I set up, I called "Andretti" because it was FAST! Of course now it's the slowest non-server in the house. My servers are all ancient cast-offs or flea market retreads. (Running RAID-1, of course.)
Another comment on tax cuts, but on business tax cuts...
The point is to "give" (or not take away) business money so they will invest it. But in today's market, the problem is a lack of demand. So ANY business will see that they currently have excess capacity, and there is absolutely no point in investing in equipment - in fact they would generally be stupid to do so. In today's climate, if business got some extra money, the smart thing to do would be to sack it away, reduce debt, or go looking for mergers or acquisitions. Guess what - the "business improvements" of consolidations really mean eliminiating "redundancies", a fancy way of saying that they can cut staff.
In other words, in the current market, cutting taxes for businesses will make the problem worse by putting more people out of jobs.
This really hits the point in more ways than you say.
Why is the OS "an important non-commodity product" that needs to be repurchased every few years?
In this respect, stow the "waiting for it to compile" jokes for half a minute, and take a look at Gentoo Linux. Gentoo has releases, but they're no big deal. By and large, you just keep your software up-to-date, and that's it. Every now and then there's a big and obnoxious change, like gcc, glibc, or xorg major revisions, and some pain in dealing with it. But most of the time you just stay up-to-date, and occasionally add or remove software as your needs change.
No upgrades, no need to reinstall, no muss, no fuss.
In the commercial software world, this would be equivalent to "service packs forever," and occasionally the opportunity to purchase or perhaps be given new "features" to take advantage of new hardware or software developments.
The revenue story need not be all bad with this model, either. In addition to "features" you could purchase "skins" and other add-ons to personalized your own system. This might sound like a horrendous testing and software reliability nightmare, but perhaps if the programming interfaces were better designed it might well be more reliable.
But the core problem is that Microsoft has been keeping the OS one of a very few non-commodity parts in a PC, one of the very few profitable parts of the box. In order to sustain that model, they have to keep revamping it every few years. In order to keep people purchasing the NEW! version they have to CHANGE! enough things that people feel they're getting their money's worth.
I started to years (decades?) ago, and got distracted.
Yeah, but Machiavelli is in the same club with Nero, Caligula, etc. Maybe not in the same circle of that club, but the same club nonetheless. Not a good way to be remembered.
Of course these days it appears that Putin is trying to move Stalin from that same club into a more respectable one.
Does this mean that we have to retire the number "6"?
Now we'll have to adjust our educational cirricula to have kids learn to count, 1-2-3-4-5-7-8-9-etc. Think of the updates to computers that will be required. This will be worse than Y2K, worst than the recent changes to DST rules, worse than the leap second!
are government and corporate interests that don't like the "leveling" effects of the internet. In eventual effect, how different is a DDOS attack from a Great Firewall. (not necessarily "of China") I know DDOS and filtering have different immediate effects, but I'm thinking of the social and political utility here, as well.
Today my wife/daughter had "I Love Lucy" playing (VitaMeataVegamin) and the crawl kept up the whole time, about the channel being dropped if you were a Time Warner customer, etc.
We've had corporate warfare playing on our computers now for decades - I guess it's time it made its way to our TV sets. The typical computer is a mishmash of a Microsoft OS, this company's free trial for this software, that company's free trial for that software, etc. Then we find out that this software doesn't play well with that software, and the next OS upgrade doesn't play well with either. It's corporate warfare, and the battleground they're fighting on is our computers.
For that matter, there have been several Internet outages as companies "negotiate" peering agreements.
Now it's moving to our TV sets, too.
AT this juncture it's a good idea to remember that apparently we are consumers, not customers. Our role in life is to give them our money, in exchange for whatever they deign to give us in return. Their agendas are apparently more important than delivering goods and services that discerning customers (What the heck are those?!?) want and are willing to pay for.
This too shall pass - I hope.
But to read the report, it sounds almost as if they want to fix the restraints, and change the pressure suit procedures... so they can suffer more??? I know, they're looking to make "slightly less catastrophic" incidents survivable.
> I'm willing to bet that if everyone who *REALLY* wants to see great F/OSS
> drivers for ATI were to plop down $5 USD
I was perhaps thinking of making this an "Ask Slashdot" question, breaking my years-long moratorium on ever bothering to try to submit something to them, again. I'm sure micropayment questions are a dup, but an occasional dump on their current state would be nice to have.
How do I dump $5 on someone?
I don't give out my credit card number freely. I don't like PayPal - they really, really, really want my bank account number for a direct feed. I know there are ways to get around that, but I just don't want to deal with people so interested in getting into my funds. I'd like someone who operates kind of like EZ-Pass - I initiate a credit card transaction to give them a balance every so often, and then I can spend from that balance. No bank account tap, no ongoing credit card tap.
Somewhere up-thread there was a remark that the developer would like an HDMI-audio-capable monitor so he could debug that part of the code, so he could us a bunch of us chipping in $5 ea.
I'd be careful on that definition of "slow." I watched IBM's decline, and at the time certain parts seemed quite precipitous. Every now and then there are inflection points, for example where network effects were working in your favor, and then those same network effects turn against you. Plus sometimes the outlook on a situation changes, and being "properly diversified" turns into "the death of a thousand paper-cuts" almost overnight.
Nor do I think Microsoft will die. At some point I expect them to tread the road trod decades ago by IBM, with the same pain. But guess what, IBM is still with us, and I expect to Microsoft to be, as well. But IBM no longer dictates what the industry does, and I expect the same thing to happen to Microsoft. Furthermore, the industry benefited when IBM stopped dictating, and I expect the same types of benefits when Microsoft is no longer able to.
As you say, my daughter's Ubuntu machine plays perfectly nicely with my Gentoo infrastructure, and my son's WinXP machine does too, for that matter. I'll presume that my daughter's boyfriend's Mac will plug into my network and run just fine, whenever that becomes necessary.
It all runs on standards - real, open, cross-platform, public standards.
You're absolutely right! On the desktop, Microsoft is IT, and will be IT forever! The big I.T. news of the year 3008 will be yet another Windows migration, how many will advise waiting a year until the first service pack is out. Of course NEXT year - 3009 - will be the year of the Linux desktop.
After all, contrary to what Lester Throeau says, present trends WILL continue. 3008 will look just like 2008, simply further along Moore's law, poorer health coverage at greater premiums, nation never more divided, etc.
A most appropriate remark, considering that too many seem to make a religion of money, economics, "free market", etc.
Nice idea, one problem is that they have a very big gun that shoots lawyers, and you have only your own financial resources. The courts really aren't fair, for that reason. That's really what the RIAA has been doing, and with a few notable exceptions, they've been making out very well at it - except in the court of public opinion.
Another problem is EULA - really what they represent - companies shooting lawyers at you, in another form. Some time read "Good Omens" by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman and see what they have to say about software licenses/contracts/warranties.
They didn't fail miserably - they succeeded wildly! They got $200,000,000,000 in your tax dollars and mine, and didn't have to deliver a thing but double-talk. If I were a greedy SOB of a stockholder or executive with no sense of personal ethics, I'd pick that as THE business model to emulate.
**** SPOILER ALERT ****
She was washed up to shore near Singapore, taken in for a while by some friendly monks(?), and eventually wound up as a cheap lounge singer.
Medium-sized spoiler from "Song of Singapore", and absolutely delightful piece of cheesy comedy seen at Capital Rep, in Albany, NY, many years ago.
As the doctor in "Life and Death" near the beginning of the game you would occasionally get "paged," and have to refer to a little cardboard gizmo to give the right response. Obviously a variation of the "manual page/rotating paper disk" mentioned earlier. A bit tougher/more annoying because it wasn't up-front, just a few random times early in the game.
But now Vista is OK, so Heaven forfend! Don't even think about migrating to one of those other platforms like Mac or Linux. All you need to do with (Insert latest Microsoft platform here.) is wait about a year until SP1 or SP2 comes out, and then it'll be great. Of course by that time the next Microsoft platform is on it's way, but you just need to wait until it's a bit over a year old, too.
Remember, for any other platform, problems like this are a reason to flee back to Microsoft. But for a Microsoft platform, it's obvious that you just wait a year, but new up-to-date hardware, and all will be fine.
Aren't double-standards great, especially when most people don't recognize them as such?