IBM, last time I checked, made something like 45% of its revenue from hardware and 35% from consulting. Software accounts for a paltry 15% (the rest they make from finance). IBM is not in the software business, really. They make AIX so they can sell RS/6000s. They make VisualAge so people can write desktop applications for DB/2 databases, and they make DB/2 so people will buy mainframes. The consulting part of IBM is fairly vendor-neutral; I've worked with them to implement BEA WebLogic on Solaris instead of WebSphere on AIX for example.
Software is an overhead for IBM. It's a distraction from hardware and services. Open Source allows IBM to sell hardware and services without having to pay to develop the software to run on it and/or implement on behalf of customers. That's the reason, and the only reason, IBM is into Linux.
If you thought SP2 would be a speed upgrade then you also buy the previous lines that Win98, ME, NT4, W2K, XP would make Windows faster than previous versions.
Actually, on identical hardware (my 1Ghz PIII Dell laptop) XP starts significantly more quickly than Win2K, and resumes from standby more quickly too. Otherwise performance is about the same.
we make getting to the moon regularly a reality before we try to go to mars.. I think when we can get to the moon and back, we will have developed the things we need to go to mars, not to mention it will make building the things needed to get to mars alot easier. any attempt at mars should be launched from the moon, or very close too it.
Dr Robert Zubrin has shown that it is EASIER to get to Mars than the moon. Why? Because Mars has everything you need on it to manufacture rocket fuel, among other things. You don't need to carry fuel for the return trip if you can deploy a device to process fuel from the atmosphere (he has built such a device and operated it successfully in a pressure chamber containing a reconstruction of Martian atmosphere). On the other hand, the moon has pretty much nothing you can easily use. Silicon dioxide is very stable; splitting it up takes vast amounts of energy. You couldn't even manufacture solar panels up there, despite having all the elements you need on hand, unless you brought a nuclear reactor with you to run the process! Orbital mechanics mean that if you time the journey right, you don't even need much more velocity from Earth to get to Mars compared to the moon; you just need to have a few months worth of food and water rather than a few days.
I strongly suggest you read The Case For Mars (by Dr Zubrin). He addresses all the points you raise, in great detail.
Amnesty International also estimated about 500,000 iraq children dead from international sanctions
Then Amnesty International is full of idiots. Read the text of the UN proclamations and you will see that medicine, educational material, etc was SPECIFICALLY EXCLUDED. Also you will find that there was a little thing called "food for oil" which meant that Iraq got food for its oil exports instead of cash which it could spend on weapons. The sanctions killed no-one. On the other hand, Saddam Hussein, taking out his anger at sanctions on helpless innocents did.
Funny how at the start of the war no one was talking about saving Iraqis, but only about making America safe from WMDs.
Yeah I agree with you that the WMD argument wa stupid. They should've just said Saddam is a genocidal maniac and he needs to be gotten rid of. Aye, and then we should've gone after Mugabe.
We intuitively understand what's fair between individuals, corporations are legal fictions. I don't see a reason to keep them at all.
Because without a corporate entity, the risk of any substantial project is too great. This is one of the reasons Islamic economies are undeveloped and dominated by a few families such as the House of Saud. The Koran clearly states rules for what happens to a business venture when a principal dies, how it is to be divided up. That's one of the reasons families are so important there, if a business venture spans families, it is very difficult to hold it together after the death of a founder. A corporation allows one to transcend individuals; while ownership can be divided between and traded between individuals, the corporation remains a single entity and can operate indefinitely. The invention of the joint-stock corporation ranks alongside the invention of containerized shipping as one of the greatest economic innovations of all time.
Re:the whole IP issue is invalid
on
Is IP Property?
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· Score: 1
In scientific circles, the rules traditionally have been: 1) Nobody owns an idea, and you can use others' ideas freely for any purpose; but 2) You must give credit for ideas that you use.
You are missing the point that "science" is paid for with public (i.e. taxpayer's) money. Where do you think the cash for those fancy facilities like CERN or LHC or those big ol' Linux supercomputers comes from? Damn right that this kind of research is public property, the public paid for it!
There is no parallel between "science" and commercial technology development, which is paid for with PRIVATE money.
Conservatives believe what's good for the corporations is good for everyone. Liberals believe that what is good for the people is good for everyone.
That's deliberately misleading. Aren't employees of corporations people, then? Aren't shareholders (anyone with a mutual fund or a 401k) people? Aren't the recipients of government programs paid for by taxes on corporations people?
It is more accurate to say that conservatives favour net taxpayers and liberals favour net tax-recipients.
Strong IP laws favour the big companies - weak IP laws favour the little guy more.
Not true either. Real strong IP laws would be even handed - they would protect the creative product of an individual as strongly as an organization. If you invent something, IP law is all that protects you from seeing your idea ripped off, or used in ways that you didn't intend.
When patent infringement occurs it isn't even stealing in the traditional sense.
Mere sophistry. Like most of the anti-IP crowd, you assume that because information can be duplicated at little or no cost, it can be created at little or no cost. Well that simply isn't true, and IP allows the cost of creating something - whether a blockbuster movie or a new drug - to be shared equitably among those who get the benefit of it.
reduce the gap between rich and poor by progressive taxation
You mean legalize stealing from decent hard-working folk? Hey criminals, you don't even need to get out of bed, the government will get the money for you!
These days, criminals have more "rights" then decent folk. If you try to defend yourself the police will actually assist the criminals to bring charges against the victim, as happened to farmer Tony Martin.
The solution is this: those who are in the process of breaking the law have voluntarily abdicated the protection of the law, and are fair game for their would be "victims". Then you'll see a fall in crime.
then imagine what people living in Argentina go through when a bunch of assholes go in and start speculating with their CURRENCY. One day 3 dollars will buy you a loaf of bread, the next day, it's worthless. This has bankrupted more than a few 3rd world countries
Well, that's not strictly true. The opportunity to speculate against Argentina only existed because the local central bank had debased the currency in the first place. If you want to blame anyone, blame the corrupt politicians who just printed more paper currency to buy votes rather than growing the economy patiently. Why do you think no-one speculates against the Swiss Franc? 'Cos they manage their currency properly, what they claim it is worth against other currencies is a fair reflection of what it is worth. Ultimately the market trusts the Gnomes of Zurich more than it trusts Joe Trader. Unfortunately for Argentina, the market trusted Joe Trader's idea of what the true value was more than their central bank.
Speculators keep governments honest, and punish governments who aren't. Yeah, it's the people that suffer, but they should direct the blame at the real culprits.
Has it occurred to you that we're losing our edge, not because outsourcing, but because we haven't been working very hard to keep it? Our education system is in shambles, our young people are complete morons, and we as a culture pretty much revile the educated and glorify the average.
It's interesting to note how many successful entrepreneurs in the US are immigrants, or first generation children of immigrants. As soon as they become assimilated into US culture, they lose the respect that their families and native culture had for education and hard work, and become average.
On indeed. Western managers have a fantasy in which they sit in plush offices in Times Square and Canary Wharf, raking in fat bonuses for increasing shareholder value by axing expensive Western programmers. Meanwhile, in Bangalore and Bangkok, I'm sure local managers are sitting in almost-as-plush offices, wondering why they're supporting the overhead of these expensive Western managers, who really don't add that much value anymore.
Now I'm not arguing for protectionism - I am saying that the long term best interest of said shareholders is not best served by training and educating people whose interests are - quite rightly, from their point of view - are not at all aligned with ours.
There is just so much that is bad about Cobol that it is unbelievable that people would use it.
Yes, it's very easy to assert that, when you have 40 years worth of other languages to compare it to. When they were designed, both COBOL and FORTRAN were the best languages available anywhere for their intended purposes, namely commercial data processing and scientific number crunching.
Hey guess what, the Ford Model T wasn't actually a very good car! The Wright brother's plane actually wasn't much use! Well no shit, Sherlock!
Java is the new COBOL. No, I mean that quite seriously. COBOL means "COmmon Business Oriented Language". Java is the language of choice for modern day corporate application development. In the corporate world - which probably accounts for more actual lines of code than anything else - applications fall into two categories, forms (inputting data into databases) and reports (getting data out of databases). The corporate world wants legions of cheap, interchangeable programmers to work on these applications. Kids are taught Java at college or learn it themselves. The language makes it very easy for one person to work on another person's code, and it makes it quite painless to document your work as you go. That's the reason "hackers" don't like Java - they've just transferred their traditional dislike of COBOL to it.
Don't you need to pay for office to get that COM object?
Yes, that's true. But you have to pay for your PC too, does that mean that Linux isn't really free?
Or pay bigtime to be allowed to distribute it?
I don't know about distributing it - you just list Office among the requirements for the application. It's been a long time since I've seen a Windows PC without Word and Excel at least.
Lastly, why did you put "open source" in quotation marks?
'Cos it means different things to different people. Want some MS source code? Just look in Visual Studio, the code for MFC is right there! Go ahead and read it and modify it and whatever you want. But that wouldn't meet many people's definitions of "open source".
Eh, a small slice of the profits they make from selling the fruits of my labour would be nice.
But people happily write code that IBM later sells (or sells support for, at any rate) without seeing a penny for their efforts. Why would MS be any different?
...or at least give.doc format(s) specifications (if they even exist)
MS Office files are actually miniature filesystems in their own right, containing serialized objects that are the in-memory representation of a document. There is no intermediate step between the objects that are the document in-memory that translates it into ".doc format" on the disk - it's just the object itself.
So:
The "standard" is the class that represents the document (i.e. the code of it + the generic object serialization code)
The "standard" changes between versions because the document classes change as new features are added. There is no deliberate policy to "break" things between versions, it is just a side effect.
It is easy to use COM to instantiate Word from your own code and manipulate documents throught the API, so ".doc format" is fully accessible and reusable from your own code, just as it would be if it was "open source".
Your analysis is flawed because you are missing one fundamental concept: that the cost of creating a piece of information bears little or no relation to the cost of reproducing it. It might cost a few dollars, it might cost $100M dollars in the case of a movie, burning a DVD of it costs the same.
In the physical world, a mechanism exists to ensure that every end user contributes to the cost of creation. In your world, such a mechanism does not exist. If expensive information is to be created AT ALL, then such a mechanism MUST exist.
There is a perfectly workable mechanism: make IP behave economically like physical goods. Do you actually have an alternative?
MSN all of a sudden -- is this in part to the fact that Microsoft shoved it down our throats?
I prefer MSN to ICQ because MSN tells you when the other person is typing. It makes the conversation flow so much more naturally. Without it, with different typing speeds and people popping away from the window to do other things, you always end up with several different threads of conversation in the same window. Eventually you just have to start again, 'cos you've no idea what they just said "yes" or "no" to.
the prinicipality of SEALAND wants to be your data haven
The Principality of Sealand exists because we Brits have a long tradition of tolerating harmless eccentrics. But if it starts violating British law wholesale, it's going to get whacked[1]. It's a ship at sea as far as the law goes, and it's well within the jurisdiction of the UK. If the British police showed up and the residents of Sealand didn't play nice, the next visitor would be a Royal Navy frigate.
[1] Just like MV Ross Revenge did when it provided a platform for violating IP laws.
The books were written by Timothy Zahn and are quite excellent, the best you can find in the expanded universe in my opinion.
The Zahn books were good - but, every other novel set in the Star Wars universe post-Empire follows exactly the same plot. A former member of the old government discovers a super-weapon the Emperor was working on before he died hidden in some out-of-the-way place, and tries to get hold of it. Luke Skywalker then saves the say by effortlessly killing hundreds of bad guys. Those novels suck because a) there isn't an ounce of originality in them and b) the characters from the movies are treated with such reverence that it's impossible to care about them - we already know that they're going to win in spectacular fashion, who cares? It's like Superman. Superman isn't brave, he's indestructible. Big difference.
One interesting thing is that left-wing writers like Al Franken rely on humour, and right-wing writers like Ann Coulter rely on extensive citation of references. Again, it's emotion versus reason.
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IBM, last time I checked, made something like 45% of its revenue from hardware and 35% from consulting. Software accounts for a paltry 15% (the rest they make from finance). IBM is not in the software business, really. They make AIX so they can sell RS/6000s. They make VisualAge so people can write desktop applications for DB/2 databases, and they make DB/2 so people will buy mainframes. The consulting part of IBM is fairly vendor-neutral; I've worked with them to implement BEA WebLogic on Solaris instead of WebSphere on AIX for example.
Software is an overhead for IBM. It's a distraction from hardware and services. Open Source allows IBM to sell hardware and services without having to pay to develop the software to run on it and/or implement on behalf of customers. That's the reason, and the only reason, IBM is into Linux.
If you thought SP2 would be a speed upgrade then you also buy the previous lines that Win98, ME, NT4, W2K, XP would make Windows faster than previous versions.
Actually, on identical hardware (my 1Ghz PIII Dell laptop) XP starts significantly more quickly than Win2K, and resumes from standby more quickly too. Otherwise performance is about the same.
we make getting to the moon regularly a reality before we try to go to mars.. I think when we can get to the moon and back, we will have developed the things we need to go to mars, not to mention it will make building the things needed to get to mars alot easier. any attempt at mars should be launched from the moon, or very close too it.
Dr Robert Zubrin has shown that it is EASIER to get to Mars than the moon. Why? Because Mars has everything you need on it to manufacture rocket fuel, among other things. You don't need to carry fuel for the return trip if you can deploy a device to process fuel from the atmosphere (he has built such a device and operated it successfully in a pressure chamber containing a reconstruction of Martian atmosphere). On the other hand, the moon has pretty much nothing you can easily use. Silicon dioxide is very stable; splitting it up takes vast amounts of energy. You couldn't even manufacture solar panels up there, despite having all the elements you need on hand, unless you brought a nuclear reactor with you to run the process! Orbital mechanics mean that if you time the journey right, you don't even need much more velocity from Earth to get to Mars compared to the moon; you just need to have a few months worth of food and water rather than a few days.
I strongly suggest you read The Case For Mars (by Dr Zubrin). He addresses all the points you raise, in great detail.
women will be leading the mission to Mars
Females probably make better astronauts than males purely by virtue of on average being smaller and lighter per given unit of brainpower.
Amnesty International also estimated about 500,000 iraq children dead from international sanctions
Then Amnesty International is full of idiots. Read the text of the UN proclamations and you will see that medicine, educational material, etc was SPECIFICALLY EXCLUDED. Also you will find that there was a little thing called "food for oil" which meant that Iraq got food for its oil exports instead of cash which it could spend on weapons. The sanctions killed no-one. On the other hand, Saddam Hussein, taking out his anger at sanctions on helpless innocents did.
Funny how at the start of the war no one was talking about saving Iraqis, but only about making America safe from WMDs.
Yeah I agree with you that the WMD argument wa stupid. They should've just said Saddam is a genocidal maniac and he needs to be gotten rid of. Aye, and then we should've gone after Mugabe.
We intuitively understand what's fair between individuals, corporations are legal fictions. I don't see a reason to keep them at all.
Because without a corporate entity, the risk of any substantial project is too great. This is one of the reasons Islamic economies are undeveloped and dominated by a few families such as the House of Saud. The Koran clearly states rules for what happens to a business venture when a principal dies, how it is to be divided up. That's one of the reasons families are so important there, if a business venture spans families, it is very difficult to hold it together after the death of a founder. A corporation allows one to transcend individuals; while ownership can be divided between and traded between individuals, the corporation remains a single entity and can operate indefinitely. The invention of the joint-stock corporation ranks alongside the invention of containerized shipping as one of the greatest economic innovations of all time.
In scientific circles, the rules traditionally have been: 1) Nobody owns an idea, and you can use others' ideas freely for any purpose; but 2) You must give credit for ideas that you use.
You are missing the point that "science" is paid for with public (i.e. taxpayer's) money. Where do you think the cash for those fancy facilities like CERN or LHC or those big ol' Linux supercomputers comes from? Damn right that this kind of research is public property, the public paid for it!
There is no parallel between "science" and commercial technology development, which is paid for with PRIVATE money.
Conservatives believe what's good for the corporations is good for everyone. Liberals believe that what is good for the people is good for everyone.
That's deliberately misleading. Aren't employees of corporations people, then? Aren't shareholders (anyone with a mutual fund or a 401k) people? Aren't the recipients of government programs paid for by taxes on corporations people?
It is more accurate to say that conservatives favour net taxpayers and liberals favour net tax-recipients.
Strong IP laws favour the big companies - weak IP laws favour the little guy more.
Not true either. Real strong IP laws would be even handed - they would protect the creative product of an individual as strongly as an organization. If you invent something, IP law is all that protects you from seeing your idea ripped off, or used in ways that you didn't intend.
When patent infringement occurs it isn't even stealing in the traditional sense.
Mere sophistry. Like most of the anti-IP crowd, you assume that because information can be duplicated at little or no cost, it can be created at little or no cost. Well that simply isn't true, and IP allows the cost of creating something - whether a blockbuster movie or a new drug - to be shared equitably among those who get the benefit of it.
reduce the gap between rich and poor by progressive taxation
You mean legalize stealing from decent hard-working folk? Hey criminals, you don't even need to get out of bed, the government will get the money for you!
These days, criminals have more "rights" then decent folk. If you try to defend yourself the police will actually assist the criminals to bring charges against the victim, as happened to farmer Tony Martin.
The solution is this: those who are in the process of breaking the law have voluntarily abdicated the protection of the law, and are fair game for their would be "victims". Then you'll see a fall in crime.
then imagine what people living in Argentina go through when a bunch of assholes go in and start speculating with their CURRENCY. One day 3 dollars will buy you a loaf of bread, the next day, it's worthless. This has bankrupted more than a few 3rd world countries
Well, that's not strictly true. The opportunity to speculate against Argentina only existed because the local central bank had debased the currency in the first place. If you want to blame anyone, blame the corrupt politicians who just printed more paper currency to buy votes rather than growing the economy patiently. Why do you think no-one speculates against the Swiss Franc? 'Cos they manage their currency properly, what they claim it is worth against other currencies is a fair reflection of what it is worth. Ultimately the market trusts the Gnomes of Zurich more than it trusts Joe Trader. Unfortunately for Argentina, the market trusted Joe Trader's idea of what the true value was more than their central bank.
Speculators keep governments honest, and punish governments who aren't. Yeah, it's the people that suffer, but they should direct the blame at the real culprits.
Has it occurred to you that we're losing our edge, not because outsourcing, but because we haven't been working very hard to keep it? Our education system is in shambles, our young people are complete morons, and we as a culture pretty much revile the educated and glorify the average.
It's interesting to note how many successful entrepreneurs in the US are immigrants, or first generation children of immigrants. As soon as they become assimilated into US culture, they lose the respect that their families and native culture had for education and hard work, and become average.
the short-sighted benefits of outsourcing
On indeed. Western managers have a fantasy in which they sit in plush offices in Times Square and Canary Wharf, raking in fat bonuses for increasing shareholder value by axing expensive Western programmers. Meanwhile, in Bangalore and Bangkok, I'm sure local managers are sitting in almost-as-plush offices, wondering why they're supporting the overhead of these expensive Western managers, who really don't add that much value anymore.
Now I'm not arguing for protectionism - I am saying that the long term best interest of said shareholders is not best served by training and educating people whose interests are - quite rightly, from their point of view - are not at all aligned with ours.
There is just so much that is bad about Cobol that it is unbelievable that people would use it.
Yes, it's very easy to assert that, when you have 40 years worth of other languages to compare it to. When they were designed, both COBOL and FORTRAN were the best languages available anywhere for their intended purposes, namely commercial data processing and scientific number crunching.
Hey guess what, the Ford Model T wasn't actually a very good car! The Wright brother's plane actually wasn't much use! Well no shit, Sherlock!
Java is the new COBOL. No, I mean that quite seriously. COBOL means "COmmon Business Oriented Language". Java is the language of choice for modern day corporate application development. In the corporate world - which probably accounts for more actual lines of code than anything else - applications fall into two categories, forms (inputting data into databases) and reports (getting data out of databases). The corporate world wants legions of cheap, interchangeable programmers to work on these applications. Kids are taught Java at college or learn it themselves. The language makes it very easy for one person to work on another person's code, and it makes it quite painless to document your work as you go. That's the reason "hackers" don't like Java - they've just transferred their traditional dislike of COBOL to it.
Don't you need to pay for office to get that COM object?
Yes, that's true. But you have to pay for your PC too, does that mean that Linux isn't really free?
Or pay bigtime to be allowed to distribute it?
I don't know about distributing it - you just list Office among the requirements for the application. It's been a long time since I've seen a Windows PC without Word and Excel at least.
Lastly, why did you put "open source" in quotation marks?
'Cos it means different things to different people. Want some MS source code? Just look in Visual Studio, the code for MFC is right there! Go ahead and read it and modify it and whatever you want. But that wouldn't meet many people's definitions of "open source".
Eh, a small slice of the profits they make from selling the fruits of my labour would be nice.
But people happily write code that IBM later sells (or sells support for, at any rate) without seeing a penny for their efforts. Why would MS be any different?
MS Office files are actually miniature filesystems in their own right, containing serialized objects that are the in-memory representation of a document. There is no intermediate step between the objects that are the document in-memory that translates it into ".doc format" on the disk - it's just the object itself.
So:
This is a big fundamental difference.
Your analysis is flawed because you are missing one fundamental concept: that the cost of creating a piece of information bears little or no relation to the cost of reproducing it. It might cost a few dollars, it might cost $100M dollars in the case of a movie, burning a DVD of it costs the same.
In the physical world, a mechanism exists to ensure that every end user contributes to the cost of creation. In your world, such a mechanism does not exist. If expensive information is to be created AT ALL, then such a mechanism MUST exist.
There is a perfectly workable mechanism: make IP behave economically like physical goods. Do you actually have an alternative?
MSN all of a sudden -- is this in part to the fact that Microsoft shoved it down our throats?
I prefer MSN to ICQ because MSN tells you when the other person is typing. It makes the conversation flow so much more naturally. Without it, with different typing speeds and people popping away from the window to do other things, you always end up with several different threads of conversation in the same window. Eventually you just have to start again, 'cos you've no idea what they just said "yes" or "no" to.
And your point is, #1751...??? :-)
Kids these days...
the prinicipality of SEALAND wants to be your data haven
The Principality of Sealand exists because we Brits have a long tradition of tolerating harmless eccentrics. But if it starts violating British law wholesale, it's going to get whacked[1]. It's a ship at sea as far as the law goes, and it's well within the jurisdiction of the UK. If the British police showed up and the residents of Sealand didn't play nice, the next visitor would be a Royal Navy frigate.
[1] Just like MV Ross Revenge did when it provided a platform for violating IP laws.
The books were written by Timothy Zahn and are quite excellent, the best you can find in the expanded universe in my opinion.
The Zahn books were good - but, every other novel set in the Star Wars universe post-Empire follows exactly the same plot. A former member of the old government discovers a super-weapon the Emperor was working on before he died hidden in some out-of-the-way place, and tries to get hold of it. Luke Skywalker then saves the say by effortlessly killing hundreds of bad guys. Those novels suck because a) there isn't an ounce of originality in them and b) the characters from the movies are treated with such reverence that it's impossible to care about them - we already know that they're going to win in spectacular fashion, who cares? It's like Superman. Superman isn't brave, he's indestructible. Big difference.
think political views can develop, and change.
One interesting thing is that left-wing writers like Al Franken rely on humour, and right-wing writers like Ann Coulter rely on extensive citation of references. Again, it's emotion versus reason.
This is the *third* time this story has been posted :).
How about if Slashdot gave compensation to all us subscribers when their editors screw up again?
It's a holiday that celebrates his failure and execution
I prefer to think of him as the last honest man to enter the Houses of Parliament.