GM restricts disgruntled new car owners from crashing their cars through the dealer's showroom windows.
MacDonald's restricts customers from barfing up Big Macs onto the floors their buildings.
Kodak prevents customers from taking nude photos using Kodak film.
Exxon prevents customers from using vehicles fueled with Exxon gasoline from being driven to Sierra Club meetings.
Going purely by paid for shipments, your figures are going to be wildly inaccurate.
Not necessarily. If you're the CEO of a company that is thinking about selling widgets as a profit making venture, then you're very interested in paid shipments. If you're interested in interoperability or total user base, however, then you'll care about actual deployments. Both types of numbers are useful.
The key thing for the rest of us is to pay close attention so that we don't use the information out of context.
In your opinion, is OS market share (meaning 'sales') more important than installed base? Which of these do you think that the average user should be more concerned with?
The results from these surveys such as these get a lot of attention in the media and on sites such as slashdot. But who are the real users of this data? Is anyone making strategic business decisions based on what IDC or GartnerGroup says?
It makes no sense to me that wired broadband (cable or DSL) is so expensive in the United States. After all, most of the infrastructure is already there - it's not like anybody has to string new wires all accross town in order to start providing the service.
So why does it cost the user so much? Why doesn't a provider simply drop their price to $25 per month, and grab most of the market? I would switch from my time limited $10 per month AT&T dial up account to broadband in a second if it didn't cost so much.
Stallman knew of a computer scientist at
Carnegie-Mellon University with a copy of the Xerox source, and asked for a copy in order to add this feature.
I thought that Xerox was a company, not a feature. Perhaps you are referring to Interpress, which is a Page Description Language that pre-dates Postscript and was considered by many to be superior. The problem was that Xerox kept the specifications secret, so nobody but them could support it. The rest is history.
Passing judgement on a group of individuals based on the actions of an extreme few will not lead anyone to the truth. This applies to liberals, conservatives, christians, jews, blacks, whites, and any other "movement" that you care to name. Let's drop the generalizations, and start addressing our real differences.
Could someone please provide a pointer to more information about the IBM transceiver that plugs into a USB port? Is this a real product or a prototype?
The "shell" has been a key feature of Unix/Linux for over twenty years. The concept of having the freedom to use a different shell is clearly popular and important among users. Do you have any thoughts about why the shell concept has not caught on with other operating systems? I'm thinking of NT and Win2K in particular, but it seems to be true in general.
Flex time allows people to more easily integrate work with the rest of their lives. Examples:
- You can drop off your kids at school (or wait with them at home until the bus arrives) in the morning before going to work.
- You can go home at lunch to care for a family member/pet/whatever.
- You can leave work for a couple hours to go to the doctor.
- You can leave work in the middle of the afternoon to play golf or go shopping.
Business text books call this empowerment.
If the bean counters need business justification, then explain to them that flex time improves worker morale, which in turn leads more job satisfaction (which means less turn over).
BTW, I have worked for the same company for almost twenty years, and have never been told what time I have to be at work. And then people wonder why I keep working here... there's more to life than money.
I know that it's popular to bash how Xerox has handled the inventions that have come out of PARC, but many of the claims stated on/. (and elsewhere) are uninformed. Let's look a a few of PARC's inventions.
Ethernet: Xerox made a tactical decision to give away free licenses in exchange for a partnership with DEC and Intel. IMHO this was a good idea, because that the time (remeber that this was before IBM introduced the PC) it was not at all obvious that ethernet would become a defacto standard. The biggest player in the computer market at that time (IBM) didn't support it, for example.
Mouse: Contrary to popular belief, Xerox didn't invent it.
Laser Printer: While one can argue that Xerox has not capitalized on this invention as much as they should have, they have still made many millions of dollars off this invention. I'm talking here about big printers (9700, DocuTech, etc), the ones that run at between 60 and 180 pages per minute and sell for $300K or more. Imagine how many printers HP has to sell to equal the profit that Xerox gets from selling just one of these babies!
GUI: Again, Xerox didn't invent it. They did, however, invent the Desktop metaphor (the idea that your computer screen should be arranged to look like a desk, with file folders, in-baskets, etc). This is one area where Xerox probably should have done better.
The PC: Bashing Xerox for it's handling of the PC is sort of like criticizing Thomas Edison for not capitalizing on his invention of the telephone (look up the history if you think that Alexander G. Bell was the only person working on this technology).
Don't forget the new stuff, such as Smart Paper and PolyBots. And don't forget the materials research that goes on at PARC (they invented the laser diode, for example) and Xerox is profiting from.
I'm not suggesting that Xerox should be nominated for sainthood, but PARC has easily paid for itself.
It's been 20+ years since the OPEC oil embargo, yet the United States is even more dependent on imported oil than ever in history. Some have suggested that opening new oil fields (such as in the Artic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska) can help solve this, but it seems unlikely that the US has enough domestic untapped capacity to provide a long term (25+ year) solution to thew problem. Others have stated that we should allow the price of gasoline to increase in order to encourage research in alternative energy sources, but this may create problems for the economy.
What are your proposals to solve the long-term US energy problem?
I was in your shoes about ten years ago, and the transition does not have to be painful. There can be a certain amount of satisfaction from helping others achieve greatness. Just remember that at least half of management is dealing with people, and all people are different.
Now, here are the two books that I recommend:
1. The One Minute Manager. This book shows how to give out reward, critisism, etc. without over doing it.
2. The Mythical Man Month. This is the best book on technical management that I have seen. Some of the examples are outdated, but the general ideas remain true.
For bonus points, read The Soul of a New Machine. Although it's almost twenty years old, it does a great job at how obsessed people in our industry can be with their jobs.
Ok, so the cost to get a pound of material into orbit is going down. What about the cost of that pound of material? Has the cost of a communications satellite gone down at the same rate? Is there new earth orbiting killer app that is significately less expensive to build/maintain?
Or to make the difference even more clear, IPP is to Postscript as HTTP is to HTML (or PDF, JPEG, or whatever). IPP does not care what is in the document.
I work in the test group of a large hardware manufacturer, and am actively involved in both MS and Novell certification. Linux certification has been something of a mystery to us (which is why I started reading/.), and we're still not sure what to do.
With MS and Novell, a number of our Fortune 100 customers started asking for this, and both MS and Novell are very open about what has to be done (both technically and procedurally) to receive their logo. For example, MS specifies specific applications, OS versions, HW configs, etc. You can read the thorny details here.
With Linux, however, to my knowledge none of our customers have asked for certification. Some have asked for compatibility with specific distros, while others simply require "Linux compatibility" (whatever that means). And unlike MS and Novell, there are no rules (formal or otherwise) about what testing needs to be done.
If the Linux community wants to be serious about certification, then formal testing procedures need to be defined, and an authority needs to be put in charge of the administration of the certification logo. Until that happens, each major HW manufacturer will continue to define their own procedures based on whatever business case they can justify.
Believe me, folks, if enough users start holding up their wallets and demand a specific type of Linix certification as a purchasing criteria, the HW manufacturers will listen.
Nope. The vast majority of admins won't even see this list, much less fix the problems on their systems. Crackers will continue to exploit these bugs on those systems for a long time. Meanwhile, the good admins will patch their systems and at least they will now be protected.
Security through obscurity continues to be a bad idea. That's why publishing this list is a good thing.
The whole purpose of copyright laws and treaties are to set the boundaries for what control artists have over their work. You can question whether they deserve to be paid, but that's really a secondary issue. The bigger question is whether a work has intellectual value, and if so should the creator of that work be allowed any control over it?
One answer is that we (society) want to encourage artists to share what they create, and to encourage this we grant them some amount of control over their work. Without this many artists might choose not to share. This is a demonstration of respect for the artist, and because we respect them we allow them to decide the terms under which they will share their work with us.
/Don
P.S. The difference between being a parent and an artist is that there is no need (in general) for society to encourage people to be parents.
Slashdot Mirror
I can see it now:
GM restricts disgruntled new car owners from crashing their cars through the dealer's showroom windows.
MacDonald's restricts customers from barfing up Big Macs onto the floors their buildings.
Kodak prevents customers from taking nude photos using Kodak film.
Exxon prevents customers from using vehicles fueled with Exxon gasoline from being driven to Sierra Club meetings.
I love where this is going...
/Don
Not that I'm complaining; if we want to stop Microsoft we need as many allies as we can get.
Not necessarily. If you're the CEO of a company that is thinking about selling widgets as a profit making venture, then you're very interested in paid shipments. If you're interested in interoperability or total user base, however, then you'll care about actual deployments. Both types of numbers are useful.
The key thing for the rest of us is to pay close attention so that we don't use the information out of context.
IDG is a different company than IDC.
In your opinion, is OS market share (meaning 'sales') more important than installed base? Which of these do you think that the average user should be more concerned with?
The results from these surveys such as these get a lot of attention in the media and on sites such as slashdot. But who are the real users of this data? Is anyone making strategic business decisions based on what IDC or GartnerGroup says?
So why does it cost the user so much? Why doesn't a provider simply drop their price to $25 per month, and grab most of the market? I would switch from my time limited $10 per month AT&T dial up account to broadband in a second if it didn't cost so much.
I thought that Xerox was a company, not a feature. Perhaps you are referring to Interpress, which is a Page Description Language that pre-dates Postscript and was considered by many to be superior. The problem was that Xerox kept the specifications secret, so nobody but them could support it. The rest is history.
north.coaster
Could someone please provide a pointer to more information about the IBM transceiver that plugs into a USB port? Is this a real product or a prototype?
Thanks
Don
2001-03-17 14:22:58
Here's some useless text to get around the lameless filter.
The "shell" has been a key feature of Unix/Linux for over twenty years. The concept of having the freedom to use a different shell is clearly popular and important among users. Do you have any thoughts about why the shell concept has not caught on with other operating systems? I'm thinking of NT and Win2K in particular, but it seems to be true in general.
north.coaster
- You can drop off your kids at school (or wait with them at home until the bus arrives) in the morning before going to work.
- You can go home at lunch to care for a family member/pet/whatever.
- You can leave work for a couple hours to go to the doctor.
- You can leave work in the middle of the afternoon to play golf or go shopping.
Business text books call this empowerment.
If the bean counters need business justification, then explain to them that flex time improves worker morale, which in turn leads more job satisfaction (which means less turn over).
BTW, I have worked for the same company for almost twenty years, and have never been told what time I have to be at work. And then people wonder why I keep working here... there's more to life than money.
north.coaster
I know that it's popular to bash how Xerox has handled the inventions that have come out of PARC, but many of the claims stated on /. (and elsewhere) are uninformed. Let's look a a few of PARC's inventions.
Ethernet: Xerox made a tactical decision to give away free licenses in exchange for a partnership with DEC and Intel. IMHO this was a good idea, because that the time (remeber that this was before IBM introduced the PC) it was not at all obvious that ethernet would become a defacto standard. The biggest player in the computer market at that time (IBM) didn't support it, for example.
Mouse: Contrary to popular belief, Xerox didn't invent it.
Laser Printer: While one can argue that Xerox has not capitalized on this invention as much as they should have, they have still made many millions of dollars off this invention. I'm talking here about big printers (9700, DocuTech, etc), the ones that run at between 60 and 180 pages per minute and sell for $300K or more. Imagine how many printers HP has to sell to equal the profit that Xerox gets from selling just one of these babies!
GUI: Again, Xerox didn't invent it. They did, however, invent the Desktop metaphor (the idea that your computer screen should be arranged to look like a desk, with file folders, in-baskets, etc). This is one area where Xerox probably should have done better.
The PC: Bashing Xerox for it's handling of the PC is sort of like criticizing Thomas Edison for not capitalizing on his invention of the telephone (look up the history if you think that Alexander G. Bell was the only person working on this technology).
Don't forget the new stuff, such as Smart Paper and PolyBots. And don't forget the materials research that goes on at PARC (they invented the laser diode, for example) and Xerox is profiting from.
I'm not suggesting that Xerox should be nominated for sainthood, but PARC has easily paid for itself.
It's been 20+ years since the OPEC oil embargo, yet the United States is even more dependent on imported oil than ever in history. Some have suggested that opening new oil fields (such as in the Artic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska) can help solve this, but it seems unlikely that the US has enough domestic untapped capacity to provide a long term (25+ year) solution to thew problem. Others have stated that we should allow the price of gasoline to increase in order to encourage research in alternative energy sources, but this may create problems for the economy.
What are your proposals to solve the long-term US energy problem?
I was in your shoes about ten years ago, and the transition does not have to be painful. There can be a certain amount of satisfaction from helping others achieve greatness. Just remember that at least half of management is dealing with people, and all people are different.
Now, here are the two books that I recommend:
1. The One Minute Manager. This book shows how to give out reward, critisism, etc. without over doing it.
2. The Mythical Man Month. This is the best book on technical management that I have seen. Some of the examples are outdated, but the general ideas remain true.
For bonus points, read The Soul of a New Machine. Although it's almost twenty years old, it does a great job at how obsessed people in our industry can be with their jobs.
/Don
Nope. IPP is a protocol, not a file format.
With MS and Novell, a number of our Fortune 100 customers started asking for this, and both MS and Novell are very open about what has to be done (both technically and procedurally) to receive their logo. For example, MS specifies specific applications, OS versions, HW configs, etc. You can read the thorny details here.
With Linux, however, to my knowledge none of our customers have asked for certification. Some have asked for compatibility with specific distros, while others simply require "Linux compatibility" (whatever that means). And unlike MS and Novell, there are no rules (formal or otherwise) about what testing needs to be done.
If the Linux community wants to be serious about certification, then formal testing procedures need to be defined, and an authority needs to be put in charge of the administration of the certification logo. Until that happens, each major HW manufacturer will continue to define their own procedures based on whatever business case they can justify.
Believe me, folks, if enough users start holding up their wallets and demand a specific type of Linix certification as a purchasing criteria, the HW manufacturers will listen.
north.coaster
Surely that gives it a small amount of value...
Security through obscurity continues to be a bad idea. That's why publishing this list is a good thing.
The SEI's web site is at http://www.sei.cmu.edu/.
This sounds a lot like the DataGlyph technology that Xerox PARC introduced a few years ago. What ever happend to that?
One answer is that we (society) want to encourage artists to share what they create, and to encourage this we grant them some amount of control over their work. Without this many artists might choose not to share. This is a demonstration of respect for the artist, and because we respect them we allow them to decide the terms under which they will share their work with us.
P.S. The difference between being a parent and an artist is that there is no need (in general) for society to encourage people to be parents.