Its interesting but I think the exec that left may have had the better instinct.
Netscape needed to be based on a real hierarchical rendering engine. IE 4.0 was and it was a revolution in browsing. Granted, Microsoft did drop 500 million bucks or something absurd like that on IE, but Netscape had that kind of money and could have hung in there had they not released a 4.0 that was so limited compared to Microsoft's 4.0.
There were so many things you could not do with Netscape DOM under Netscape 4.0 that you had to believe that the Netscape engine had some fundamental shortcomings that needed to be released.
By the time it was Netscape 5.0, it was already too late. Netscape 5.0 had to be an IE 4.0 killer, and to do that, it would have had to have been Gecko based from the ground up.
Netscape had a great lead in 1996 but when IE 4.0 came out, with its far superior Java scripting capabilities, Netscape was junk. IE 5.0 only furthered that gap. And whatever happened to Netscape 5? Hmmm.
Bundling aside, IE crushed Netscape because IE was the better browser.
If Hollywood decided that it did not want to make movies for broadcast TV, then, someone else will. Even if broadcast meant the instant distribution of your work, you could still walk away with millions of dollars in advertising revenue from the initial airing of the show.
Yeah but what about all the failure modes of tape? I mean, I've zapped a few tapes inadvertantly because of magnetic fields, or, even modest temperature changes that cause the tape to stretch. I'd like a DVD in an enclosed sheath the way old floppy disks used to be, but to go back to tape? No thanks!
All relational databases have a theoretical problem that make it possible for entrants to a market place to succeed.
a) They are based on relational algebra. This is good, but, relational algebra will only take you so far. There is an entire domain of relational calculus, and if, you cannot implement all of it, you can at least make a go of cherry picking a piece of it for your own application. I would like to think my own domain is a good stab at this, but, since I'm maxed on all my credit cards and drive two cars that I can't afford, I'll assume not!
b) They are ruined by the languages that talk to them. Yes, I hear about the virtues of object oriented programming, but relational algebra, for what it is worth, is much more theoretically complete.
I write my own shareware, specialized, non-relational database and I've come to the conclusion that it is enormously difficult to match the performance of experienced relational database designs when trying to do relational types of things. I can make my database load a certain kind of data many, many times faster than SQL Server can, but when I try to do things that are more to the strength of a relational engine, my stuff looks pretty weak.
Anyone can make a relational database engine that looks really good at a million rows. But jack that up to ten million, or a hundred million, and then see just how well your design stacks up!
At some point, someone at Apple had to notice that the xbox 360 is going to ship with 3 PowerPC chips, each of which having a higher Ghz rating than the top of the line Apple G5...
Hmmm, me thinks Jobs might have been upset about that?
I for one live for the day when I can 90% of the information I need from the internet without having to be connected to it 24/7. Persistent networks are a mistake.
You know what, tell the Chinese that will ban imports of -everything- they make. Just tell them to pound sand and tell Walmart to buy its crap from somewhere else.
It's about money. Red Hat is an enterprise that exists to make money for its Shareholders. IF a deal paid a good premium to Red Hat shareholders, then, they would be foolish to sell out.
It's not unusual to have more than one O/S. IBM sells you more than one kind computer and more than one kind of operating system and has made a fair amount of money on it for years. MS could do the same.
It might save MS some money. They've got billions of dollars a year plowed into Windows R&D, and what are they getting out of it? Nothing? Where's the growth in Windows? MS could theoretically make a mountain of money simply by offering a migration path to Linux - everyone must migrate to their Linux Enterprise edition, and suddenly that's billions of dollars.
Finally, having control over the premium brand is an excellent way to hedge your bets. Microsoft would control the trump of Windows and the trump of Linux. Certainly having all of those Red Hat developers could make for better ports of things like.NET, Office. Come on, if they actually had Visual Studio for Linux, KDE may as well just give up.
In short, Microsoft jumping on the Linux bandwagon is nothing less spectacular than IBM jumping on the PC bandwagon some decades ago. Remember then, they said that elephants couldn't tap dance? History has a way of proving rebellious pundits wrong.
Invention is an art of composition. Inventors take existing technologies and compose them into new products. Technology moves faster when we can freely compose new inventions into new technologies, and so on. Patenting stifles this by making it more difficult to use new elements in a competition. Thus, patents are anametha to the advancement of arts and sciences and thus run counter to very constitutional clause which permits them.
"The original Republican Party as postulated by Freemont was in fact an abolitionist party"
Speaks for itself. The Civil War was about slavery. Saying that you believe the Civil War was about the Union is like saying you believe that the War in Iraq is about September 11th. Just like today's neoconservatives want to bring Democracy to the middle east and used 9/11 as an excuse to start the project in Iraq, the 19th century abolitionists used anything they could think of so long as it got them closer to their goal of banning slavery.
A really good proof of this is the old compromises of that predated the war. The arrangement between north and south was that one state would be admitted free and the next a slave, to preserve the balance of power in the Senate between the north and south. Then there was the mini civil war in Kansas, the John Brown incidents, all of the speeches by Frederick Douglas, all of the anti-slavery literature produced up north, the fact that the British had actually banned slavery on the high seas by fiat some years before, that even the original constitution had to allow for reduced rights for blacks in order to get the south to join the union. It was a hot button issue that dominated the American political scene from the founding of the country right up until the emancipation proclamation, and you want to say that the civil war wasn't about slavery? That's just absolutely absurd.
They are looking at the methodology objectively and have in the past. The deal is that MS keeps rolling out this same study, using the same methodology, and it isn't true.
a) they use a slower kind of encryption on the apache side, which makes apache seem slower.
b) they use a 2003 version of Red Hat with a 2.6 kernal whereas Linux is now up to a newer version.
c) they make other tuning decisions for the RH they do use in order to slow it down, and to speed Microsoft up.
In short, the test is rigged so that MS wins and Linux loses. It is that simple.
That's a good bit of revisionism but is actually not true. The original Republican Party as postulated by Freemont was in fact an abolitionist party. Lincoln himself joined the Abolitionist party and only toned down his message so that he could elected. But he was given several opportunities to avoid the Civil War, none of which he accepted. He forced the situation at Fort Sumter, and then he invaded the South, and when he finally did get his first major victories, the first thing he did was to do the Emancipation Proclamation.
The shuttles would have been a commercial spacelift operation, in addition to building a space station, the giant mars colonization mission orbiting space craft, etc.
The idea was that if you had a cheap, re-usable space system, you could do a lot more with it. Unfortunately for the Shuttle managers, they didn't get the money that they really needed to develop the thing, and, various administrations along the way found it more politically expedient to shift development costs to operating costs.
Of course, NASA did make some mistakes. I think everyone has roundly criticized them for putting the shuttle on the side of the boosters. They also couldn't actually develop the heat shield the way they wanted, so they settled for the tiles instead. But, believe it or not, the Shuttle actually came in only 4% or so over budget.
It's easy to look at past NASA endeavors in light of the gigantic clusterfuck that is ISS, but the guys that did the Shuttle design were your Apollo Veterans and X-15 veterans. They knew what they were doing.
All this bitching you do about population, and yet, you are against nuclear war. You just don't know how to have any fun, do you? Me, that's how I want to go out. I want to see the bombs going off in the distance, the giant mushroom clouds, and then, the slow death of radiation ameliorated by the massive amounts of booze I consume amid the flames of human civilization. Cheer's cockroachs, the world belongs to you now!
NASA's failures with the Space Shuttle were because the system was never fully funded. The original Shuttle as envisioned would have a 15 billion dollar development cost and would have been completely re-usable. There would have been seven shuttles, multiple assembly buildings and launch pads. At that scale, yes, the shuttle could have hit its original targets. But, they didn't get the money, some things slipped.
The Chinese are using essentially a modified Soyuz design for their manned space program. For the USA to pull the plug on the shuttle and do more of what it did with Gemini and Apollo makes a great deal of sense.
It's not a troll. You no faith in the vast capacity of the human race to overcome adversity.
I do.
Our species survived multiple ice ages and dealing with large predatory mammals and we did so through technology. Take that Mr. Sabre Tooth Tiger - we have spears now! Guess what, now the planet is warm, and all those bad old giant sloths, saber tooth tigers, every animal that ever walked or crawled and even so much as gave mankind a dirty look is now either extinct, bordering on extinct, living in a zoo, or, in the case of wolves, have been reduced to pets.
Look at what we can do today technologically. If the oceans get too high, we can build even higher walls. If the planet gets too hot, we can distribute particles in the atmosphere to cool it down. We could plant more plants to absorb C02. We will build hydrogen cars and more nuclear plants in the future and eventually we will figure out nuclear fusion. We have every means at our disposal to ensure the survival of our species, should it come to that.
The Earth exists so that we can learn how to terraform it. Obviously, because we are changing our world climate it now, it proves that yes, terraforming is something we can actually do. If we can transform our own planet, we can transform others. This is a skill to learn, not science to fear.
We cannot live on Mars or Venus now, but we can certainly heat Mars up, or cool Venus down. And that doesn't even count the many earth size planets within 100 light years of us - we can colonize those as well, and yes, we can get their with technology on the horizon, such as solar sails, fission drives, fusion drives, and even now they have made breakthroughs in understanding how hibernation can actually be drug induced, so we could simply hibernate our way through deep space.
Barring the advent of a newer and more advanced species, (most likely alien), or a global natural disaster such the sun going nova, the yellowstone volcano erupting, or comet / asteroid hitting the earth, there is every reason to believe that humanity will continue to transform our own planet as it sees fit, then our solar system, and then, gradually, the rest of our galaxy.
No matter what you do, within 20 billion years, most of the stars in our universe will no longer exist, and no amount of Gaia worshipping commy nonsense will fix that. So we may as well consume everything we can, while we can.
Fast food, cars, and appliances do not require brainwashing. What requires brainwashing is to reject them. People choose fast food because it is convenient and tasty and warm, which is a rarity in many nations. People choose cars because they are a reliable, quick and enjoyable form of transportation, and appliances greatly increase the amount of free time we have. Go ahead and haul 500lbs of ice from the creek to your house, if you prefer. Only a fool on this earth would not want to have the wealth and luxury of an average American, and only the most power mad despot could dare proclaim that the world does not have the right to that lifestyle.
Capitalism is infinitely sustainable. There is no shortage of raw materials on this earth. We have only explored the tiniest part of the earth's crust, in select areas perhaps one or two miles deeps. The entire planet is thousands of miles wide.
Even if the planet were consumed, there is more than enough raw material to satisfy a virtually infinite human population within this galaxy. When there is a will, there is a way. If we trash the Earth, there will always be new planets that we can either colonize, consume or move onto.
Verizon and the other Baby Bells argue that Muni's should not operate their own networks because they could do it better. Yet, the Baby Bells turn around and say they cannot provide coverage everywhere. If you ask me, I think if a private firms are genuinely better than government at delivering a service, it should be more effective at doing so, and so competition from the government should not be a problem for them. Let the muni's field their networks. There's no difference between a city building a water treatment facility or a city building a network.
God said to Abraham, kill me a son. Abe said, Man you must be putting me on. God said, no. Abe said, what. God said you can do what you want Abe, but, uh, next time you see me coming, you'd better run. Abe sell well where you want this killing done. God said on Highway 61.
Slashdot Mirror
Its interesting but I think the exec that left may have had the better instinct.
Netscape needed to be based on a real hierarchical rendering engine. IE 4.0 was and it was a revolution in browsing. Granted, Microsoft did drop 500 million bucks or something absurd like that on IE, but Netscape had that kind of money and could have hung in there had they not released a 4.0 that was so limited compared to Microsoft's 4.0.
There were so many things you could not do with Netscape DOM under Netscape 4.0 that you had to believe that the Netscape engine had some fundamental shortcomings that needed to be released.
By the time it was Netscape 5.0, it was already too late. Netscape 5.0 had to be an IE 4.0 killer, and to do that, it would have had to have been Gecko based from the ground up.
Netscape had a great lead in 1996 but when IE 4.0 came out, with its far superior Java scripting capabilities, Netscape was junk. IE 5.0 only furthered that gap. And whatever happened to Netscape 5? Hmmm.
Bundling aside, IE crushed Netscape because IE was the better browser.
If Hollywood decided that it did not want to make movies for broadcast TV, then, someone else will. Even if broadcast meant the instant distribution of your work, you could still walk away with millions of dollars in advertising revenue from the initial airing of the show.
Instead of separating addresses with :, why not just use the good old .?
IPV6 adressess just looks ugly.
Yeah but what about all the failure modes of tape? I mean, I've zapped a few tapes inadvertantly because of magnetic fields, or, even modest temperature changes that cause the tape to stretch. I'd like a DVD in an enclosed sheath the way old floppy disks used to be, but to go back to tape? No thanks!
All relational databases have a theoretical problem that make it possible for entrants to a market place to succeed.
a) They are based on relational algebra. This is good, but, relational algebra will only take you so far. There is an entire domain of relational calculus, and if, you cannot implement all of it, you can at least make a go of cherry picking a piece of it for your own application. I would like to think my own domain is a good stab at this, but, since I'm maxed on all my credit cards and drive two cars that I can't afford, I'll assume not!
b) They are ruined by the languages that talk to them. Yes, I hear about the virtues of object oriented programming, but relational algebra, for what it is worth, is much more theoretically complete.
I write my own shareware, specialized, non-relational database and I've come to the conclusion that it is enormously difficult to match the performance of experienced relational database designs when trying to do relational types of things. I can make my database load a certain kind of data many, many times faster than SQL Server can, but when I try to do things that are more to the strength of a relational engine, my stuff looks pretty weak.
Anyone can make a relational database engine that looks really good at a million rows. But jack that up to ten million, or a hundred million, and then see just how well your design stacks up!
At some point, someone at Apple had to notice that the xbox 360 is going to ship with 3 PowerPC chips, each of which having a higher Ghz rating than the top of the line Apple G5...
Hmmm, me thinks Jobs might have been upset about that?
I for one live for the day when I can 90% of the information I need from the internet without having to be connected to it 24/7. Persistent networks are a mistake.
You know what, tell the Chinese that will ban imports of -everything- they make. Just tell them to pound sand and tell Walmart to buy its crap from somewhere else.
If a brake line goes or a bearing gives, you can fix it right away. If there's an electrical fault, your car is done.
It's about money. Red Hat is an enterprise that exists to make money for its Shareholders. IF a deal paid a good premium to Red Hat shareholders, then, they would be foolish to sell out.
.NET, Office. Come on, if they actually had Visual Studio for Linux, KDE may as well just give up.
It's not unusual to have more than one O/S. IBM sells you more than one kind computer and more than one kind of operating system and has made a fair amount of money on it for years. MS could do the same.
It might save MS some money. They've got billions of dollars a year plowed into Windows R&D, and what are they getting out of it? Nothing? Where's the growth in Windows? MS could theoretically make a mountain of money simply by offering a migration path to Linux - everyone must migrate to their Linux Enterprise edition, and suddenly that's billions of dollars.
Finally, having control over the premium brand is an excellent way to hedge your bets. Microsoft would control the trump of Windows and the trump of Linux. Certainly having all of those Red Hat developers could make for better ports of things like
In short, Microsoft jumping on the Linux bandwagon is nothing less spectacular than IBM jumping on the PC bandwagon some decades ago. Remember then, they said that elephants couldn't tap dance? History has a way of proving rebellious pundits wrong.
Invention is an art of composition. Inventors take existing technologies and compose them into new products. Technology moves faster when we can freely compose new inventions into new technologies, and so on. Patenting stifles this by making it more difficult to use new elements in a competition. Thus, patents are anametha to the advancement of arts and sciences and thus run counter to very constitutional clause which permits them.
You know I've been mispelling it for twenty years and I'm almost so frigging old that I may just never change! :-)
"The original Republican Party as postulated by Freemont was in fact an abolitionist party"
Speaks for itself. The Civil War was about slavery. Saying that you believe the Civil War was about the Union is like saying you believe that the War in Iraq is about September 11th. Just like today's neoconservatives want to bring Democracy to the middle east and used 9/11 as an excuse to start the project in Iraq, the 19th century abolitionists used anything they could think of so long as it got them closer to their goal of banning slavery.
A really good proof of this is the old compromises of that predated the war. The arrangement between north and south was that one state would be admitted free and the next a slave, to preserve the balance of power in the Senate between the north and south. Then there was the mini civil war in Kansas, the John Brown incidents, all of the speeches by Frederick Douglas, all of the anti-slavery literature produced up north, the fact that the British had actually banned slavery on the high seas by fiat some years before, that even the original constitution had to allow for reduced rights for blacks in order to get the south to join the union. It was a hot button issue that dominated the American political scene from the founding of the country right up until the emancipation proclamation, and you want to say that the civil war wasn't about slavery? That's just absolutely absurd.
They are looking at the methodology objectively and have in the past. The deal is that MS keeps rolling out this same study, using the same methodology, and it isn't true.
a) they use a slower kind of encryption on the apache side, which makes apache seem slower.
b) they use a 2003 version of Red Hat with a 2.6 kernal whereas Linux is now up to a newer version.
c) they make other tuning decisions for the RH they do use in order to slow it down, and to speed Microsoft up.
In short, the test is rigged so that MS wins and Linux loses. It is that simple.
That's a good bit of revisionism but is actually not true. The original Republican Party as postulated by Freemont was in fact an abolitionist party. Lincoln himself joined the Abolitionist party and only toned down his message so that he could elected. But he was given several opportunities to avoid the Civil War, none of which he accepted. He forced the situation at Fort Sumter, and then he invaded the South, and when he finally did get his first major victories, the first thing he did was to do the Emancipation Proclamation.
Windows macro recorder and journalling is an obvious mistake, but also the ability to do filter drivers on keyboards.
The shuttles would have been a commercial spacelift operation, in addition to building a space station, the giant mars colonization mission orbiting space craft, etc.
The idea was that if you had a cheap, re-usable space system, you could do a lot more with it. Unfortunately for the Shuttle managers, they didn't get the money that they really needed to develop the thing, and, various administrations along the way found it more politically expedient to shift development costs to operating costs.
Of course, NASA did make some mistakes. I think everyone has roundly criticized them for putting the shuttle on the side of the boosters. They also couldn't actually develop the heat shield the way they wanted, so they settled for the tiles instead. But, believe it or not, the Shuttle actually came in only 4% or so over budget.
It's easy to look at past NASA endeavors in light of the gigantic clusterfuck that is ISS, but the guys that did the Shuttle design were your Apollo Veterans and X-15 veterans. They knew what they were doing.
All this bitching you do about population, and yet, you are against nuclear war. You just don't know how to have any fun, do you? Me, that's how I want to go out. I want to see the bombs going off in the distance, the giant mushroom clouds, and then, the slow death of radiation ameliorated by the massive amounts of booze I consume amid the flames of human civilization. Cheer's cockroachs, the world belongs to you now!
NASA's failures with the Space Shuttle were because the system was never fully funded. The original Shuttle as envisioned would have a 15 billion dollar development cost and would have been completely re-usable. There would have been seven shuttles, multiple assembly buildings and launch pads. At that scale, yes, the shuttle could have hit its original targets. But, they didn't get the money, some things slipped.
Shuttle
The Chinese are using essentially a modified Soyuz design for their manned space program. For the USA to pull the plug on the shuttle and do more of what it did with Gemini and Apollo makes a great deal of sense.
It's not a troll. You no faith in the vast capacity of the human race to overcome adversity.
I do.
Our species survived multiple ice ages and dealing with large predatory mammals and we did so through technology. Take that Mr. Sabre Tooth Tiger - we have spears now! Guess what, now the planet is warm, and all those bad old giant sloths, saber tooth tigers, every animal that ever walked or crawled and even so much as gave mankind a dirty look is now either extinct, bordering on extinct, living in a zoo, or, in the case of wolves, have been reduced to pets.
Look at what we can do today technologically. If the oceans get too high, we can build even higher walls. If the planet gets too hot, we can distribute particles in the atmosphere to cool it down. We could plant more plants to absorb C02. We will build hydrogen cars and more nuclear plants in the future and eventually we will figure out nuclear fusion. We have every means at our disposal to ensure the survival of our species, should it come to that.
The Earth exists so that we can learn how to terraform it. Obviously, because we are changing our world climate it now, it proves that yes, terraforming is something we can actually do. If we can transform our own planet, we can transform others. This is a skill to learn, not science to fear.
We cannot live on Mars or Venus now, but we can certainly heat Mars up, or cool Venus down. And that doesn't even count the many earth size planets within 100 light years of us - we can colonize those as well, and yes, we can get their with technology on the horizon, such as solar sails, fission drives, fusion drives, and even now they have made breakthroughs in understanding how hibernation can actually be drug induced, so we could simply hibernate our way through deep space.
Barring the advent of a newer and more advanced species, (most likely alien), or a global natural disaster such the sun going nova, the yellowstone volcano erupting, or comet / asteroid hitting the earth, there is every reason to believe that humanity will continue to transform our own planet as it sees fit, then our solar system, and then, gradually, the rest of our galaxy.
No matter what you do, within 20 billion years, most of the stars in our universe will no longer exist, and no amount of Gaia worshipping commy nonsense will fix that. So we may as well consume everything we can, while we can.
Fast food, cars, and appliances do not require brainwashing. What requires brainwashing is to reject them. People choose fast food because it is convenient and tasty and warm, which is a rarity in many nations. People choose cars because they are a reliable, quick and enjoyable form of transportation, and appliances greatly increase the amount of free time we have. Go ahead and haul 500lbs of ice from the creek to your house, if you prefer. Only a fool on this earth would not want to have the wealth and luxury of an average American, and only the most power mad despot could dare proclaim that the world does not have the right to that lifestyle.
Capitalism is infinitely sustainable. There is no shortage of raw materials on this earth. We have only explored the tiniest part of the earth's crust, in select areas perhaps one or two miles deeps. The entire planet is thousands of miles wide.
Even if the planet were consumed, there is more than enough raw material to satisfy a virtually infinite human population within this galaxy. When there is a will, there is a way. If we trash the Earth, there will always be new planets that we can either colonize, consume or move onto.
Verizon and the other Baby Bells argue that Muni's should not operate their own networks because they could do it better. Yet, the Baby Bells turn around and say they cannot provide coverage everywhere. If you ask me, I think if a private firms are genuinely better than government at delivering a service, it should be more effective at doing so, and so competition from the government should not be a problem for them. Let the muni's field their networks. There's no difference between a city building a water treatment facility or a city building a network.
God said to Abraham, kill me a son.
Abe said, Man you must be putting me on.
God said, no.
Abe said, what.
God said you can do what you want Abe, but, uh, next time you see me coming, you'd better run.
Abe sell well where you want this killing done.
God said on Highway 61.