They've pretty much lost they're foothold on Windows over the years to MS's tools. By heavily supporting Linux and Mac they're filling a great niche that's been left open for far too long.
Another possible offshoot of this is having them seen as a great development platform to program for multiple OS's. If that becomes the case, they could make a serious run at MS's suite of tools. This is just good news all the way around. Hope Borland has the stuff to make it happen.
And my point is that for Linux to succeed, we'll have to forget our ethics.
I honestly couldn't agree with this post any more than I do. This hits a lot of nails on the head. Thing is, I do have a problem with your ethics argument. Perhaps this is nit picking, but as you stated, those reading this are the real spokesmen for Linux.
I believe that what you're trying to get at here is to put the focus on tangible functionality rather than the political aspects behind GNU and the FSF. This can, and must, include "ethical" behavior. Linux can continue maintain high ethics and focus on the needs of the end users both consumer and corporate.
What needs to be pulled out of the debate for now is the "politics" driving this. These arguments can return to the discussion at a point in time where it's been proven that this method of software development and distribution actually work over time. It would certainly give a lot more weight to the political side of this at that time.
A couple of corrections I just have to make, even after your disclaimer. Please note, most of what I'm about to get into here was derived from "Triumph of the Nerds". This is a MUST view for folks involved with the PC industry IMHO.
First off, when IBM needed an OS, not only did MS not have one, they didn't want anything to do with making one. They initially referred IBM to the fella who wrote CPM, whose name escapes me at the moment. This fella refused to sign IBM's NDA, so IBM was back to MS for a solution which they didn't have. Have to keep in mind, MS had a great reputation at the time for development languages, but that was all.
So MS could sell there development stuff for this new PC coming out they found this fella who worked at a computer store in the area who had written a little app called QD-Dos (Quick & Dirty Dos). This fella had essentially created a knock-off of CPM. It was roughly the equivalent of what XML is to SGML in that it was a subset of simpler commands. MS offered this guy $50,000 for all rights to it, then went about hacking the heck out of it.
There is certainly a good bit more to the story, and it makes for a fascinating video. I believe the transcripts of this series are still up on PBS's site if you are so inclined.
For the record, NT's support for the older 16-bit apps isn't too far away from how Wine implements this for Linux. NT pretty much has seperate machine that gets started up for 16-bit apps in order to maintain compatibility. It's not a great solution, as it still leaves a lot of older apps out in the cold, and to the best of my knowledge provides no backwards driver support. It is definitely not part of NT's core system.
As for all them blue screens, I'd like to know what folks are doing to those boxes to get them to do that. I run NT Workstation as my primary desktop, and I provide support for several other NT Workstations. I've found it to be extremely stable for up to weeks or months at a time. Darn near the only thing that causes me to have to re-boot is an IE lockup or a power out. After running a Linux box side by side with this NT, I've found them both to be quite stable, and I've managed to also lock them both up.
On the server side, I wouldn't hesitate to implement an NT as a LAN server for file and print sharing again. Here again, I've found it to be quite a nice platform for this. For the web, Unix all the way baby! I don't have a single kind word for IIS, and I've got plenty of reasons to back it up. Stability is but one of them. This rant is running long, so I'll save my IIS bashing for later.
For an ecommerce site, speed of page handling and cgi calls is important, but so is getting that customer through the checkout aisle. What kinds of performance gains might be seen when comparing https pages between Apache and Apache+Tux?
This is one of the reasons I always refer folks to local vendors who actually build PC's from stock parts. Only under threat of mild torture (low pain threshold and all) would I ever recommend a person to go purchase a brand name PC.
From my personal experience, a user purchasing brand name PC's will eventually regret it. Usually within 6 months to a year. Buying brand name is nothing more than a hardware trap providing for only a very narrow upgrade path, if one exists at all.
In short, dodge the Windows tax by not buying from those vendors that signed up for MS's restrictive licensing. Recommend to those that trust your opinion to do the same, and you to can "Take a Bite Outta Crime".
Although I rather appreciate your fairly even handed tone to your post, I think this point is getting over blown. It's a point that I feel needs to be addressed with a bit more reality, oddly enough for the sake of Linux and open source in general.
Microsoft has done one thing that no other computer company or organization has even approached accomplishing. They developed an OS that can support an extremely wide range of hardware, and brought computing to what you would refer to as the average user. Sun, IBM and Apple all rolled together haven't accomplished half of what MS has in this regard. This keeps getting referred to as something trivial, when it's anything but. Linux is still going through the pains of trying to get all these various hardware drivers to play nice together, and to work in OEM support for them. There's obviously still quite a bit of work yet to be done to bring Linux to the desktop as well.
Point is, MS has a lot of good and bad about them. They're a big company that does a lot of stuff, or course there's going to be a lot of aspects to them. To constantly only focusing in on just the bad limits you to only learning half the lessons that a company like MS can provide.
Disclaimer: This is not meant to be a pro-MS post. There is a bigger picture here than "MS Sucks" and I just find it unfortunate that so many folks around here can't see that. Sorry for picking on you SoftwareJanitor, there are certainly folks far worse than yourself in what I'm talking about here.
What you're thinking about could only be implemented if the FBI's box were aware of what IP was being handed out to which phone number. Even then, if the caller has blocked his caller id then that would fail as well.
The only way to just drop a box in to sniff would be to sniff everything that is moving across that ISP's network. Even if the ISP was using a static IP for that customer, the FBI box would still have to be exposed to all the rest of that network's traffic. It's the nature of the beast.
Far as I'm concerned, the FBI should not be granted the authority to enter a private business to do snooping. If they want to get at a specific person, they should have to do so by tapping their phone line at their home or office, just like the days of old. Private enterprises should not be at the whim of criminal investigations, warrant or not.
Why should electronic communication be legally less protected than telephone communication?
I'll do ya one better. Why shouldn't a letter sent via electronic means not enjoy the same protections as a letter sent by the post office? Correct me if I'm wrong here, but tapping into a phone line isn't a federal offense, where as opening someone's postal mail most certainly is.
This is NOT wiretapping folks. This is the process of ripping open your sealed envelopes. Worse yet, it rips all of them open with only a flimsy promise to only look at the letters in question. The FBI does not have a great track record for being trusted to abide by only playing by the rules of a search warrant.
The really amazing thing is, America's founding fathers saw this very thing coming. The 4th amendment was not an after thought. It was put in to deliberately undermine tyranny within the nation they were building.
It's a science story discussing the economic and political issues dealing with space travel. Just a couple of messages in, and there's the obligatory Microsoft slam.
Wow, quite a rant! I'm not quite there with you on the tone it was delivered in, but I agree with the basic point you're trying to get at.
As I've begun to post more frequently around here I keep finding myself in the position of defending Microsoft. Thing is, in the off-line world I'm usually the first one in line to give them a hard time, especially concerning Internet technologies.
I don't think of myself as being two-faced or hypocritical in my opinions on this. I firmly believe in giving credit where it's due, and pointing out flaws where they exist. In so doing, I don't fit neatly into any of the on-line cliques that form up around product lines. Perhaps it's this aspect of the whole "Everything MS Sucks" crowd that appeals to many of the folks around here.
The importance of Linux taking market share seems to keep getting lost on a lot of folks. The battle isn't over releasing the source code of every bit of software. The real battle is to get enough Linux and other alternate OS's out there to insure that the entire computer industry HAS to rely on open standards to survive. As citizens of a much large community than just Open Source or FSF we all need to keep this in mind.
Here's where I'm gonna get skewered here, but MS brings a lot of cool stuff to the table. They're directly involved with darn near every standards body that has the possibility of making a difference to what the future holds for the whole of the industry. Heck, they had a huge part in helping build this industry from the very beginnings of the very first PC. Sites like/. really need to be covering this stuff, both the good and bad.
There's a lot to be learned from Microsoft that seems to get lost on the Open Source crowd. Yes, they've done some stupid things, but if that's all you can see then you've got some serious side blinders on. I personally love the "NT crashes every 5 minutes" posts. I've got enough experience with NT to know one hell of a lot better, and to also know where NT truly does fall short. What I find odd is how you never see those NT crashing posts in the same thread as some fella bouncing his Linux distro hard due to a bad make.
For whatever reasons, it's cooler to just be a zealot than to evaluate based on merits.
To do what this article suggests would open up all kinds of legal nastiness for Microsoft when it's quite apparent their lawyers are needed elsewhere. Ahh, but what if this idea really appealled to Microsoft, then what would they do between wanting to do it, and having legal ramifications?
Get somebody else to do it for them!!
Document the heck out of whatever interface talks to this thing, and provide it to a couple of smaller hardware companies, possibly some new upstarts. With the possibility of making the doohicky that gets tacked on to an MS console selling to millions of folks, you'd bet there'd be folks in line to do this.
Once all the legalities have been fought out by the wee upstart, draining them of any capitol they may have been able to put together from actually selling products, big friendly MS swoops in and buys them out. Everybody wins but the competition, and all it cost to MS was a little extra documentation and a possible loophole in their licensing.
Some day I want to run my own evil company! <audio src="evillaughter.mp3">
that apple is no better, no worse than ms when it comes to ur: Mshing their pack to trained lawyers
Ummm, when was the last time Microsoft shut down rumors about one of their upcoming products? Let's give some credit where credit is due, Apple is well ahead of the game for this particular issue.
Are you saying you could set this all up and support it for a company then? Perhaps you are one of the uber-geeks that actually has enough networking, hardware, and software knowledge to bring all the pieces together. That, and you've got enough free time to support it.
Fact is, for the very same reasons you mentioned, this is GREAT news for Linux. If you've ever had any experience at all with determining the price of a product or service you would know that under valueing can be just as detrimental to sales as over valueing. Yes, you can actually hurt your sales by having the customer get into the "so why is it so cheap" way of thinking.
Another thing you seem to completely overlook is the fact that these "Big Dumb Companies" are reinvesting a lot back into the open source community. Hell, this site we're on now has been helped to scale to it's fullest potential in a way that would be impossible as a hobby project.
It's a shame you can't see past the bedroom wall behind your monitor.
Seems to me that Rambus is acting in a perfectly legal manner based on what rights they have been granted by the patent office. While these companies go about fighting eachother over who owns what, it seems that a larger picture is being missed.
Why isn't the Patent Office held accountable for questionable patents that result in millions of dollars of legal fees? If anyone should be getting sued here, it should be those people that granted this virtually unlimited monopoly power to a company like Rambus for a technology that they didn't invent.
Until those that issue bad patents are truly held accountable for not doing the research needed to insure good patents, then we're just going to go through this same problem over and over again. Doesn't matter if we're talking about Amazon, Rambus, or Microsoft. There desperately needs to be a check and balance that doesn't involve lining the pockets of even more lawyers.
Actually, if you structure it right, you have an incentive to make it as good as possible. Imagine that you do yearly support contracts (vs per incident). Now, the fewer times people call, the more of that money you make. So, your incentive is to make it really good so people don't call, then sell the support contracts. Of course, you have to price the yearly support contracts such that they will buy them on the chance that they need it, but that's implementation detail.
The thing to figure out here is whether or not someone would purchase a support contract if the product was simple to use. In your example, the product in question hasn't forced a tech to get on the phone to call for help in a year's time. Would you renew a support contract for something this easy to use, or figure on it being cheaper in the long run to pay for per incident support?
The next logical step here is figuring out what kind of revenue you could pull in from a per incident style of billing for support. Again, making something easier to use plays heavily against this as well.
I'd guess that around a year from now we'll have a good idea as to what the answer to my question is. We'll be seeing which companies based around an open source model survive, and what level of usability they offer. I do sincerely hope that my concerns are unfounded, but unless I'm missing some basic component to the economics of this, usability is the last thing that an open source company would want.
One part of this article has actually been on my mind for a little while now. How do you base a business around selling a service for the product you sell and still encourage usability? If we were to take RedHat for example, it would seem that an ideal market for them would be tons of folks with RH Linux running, and making it as hard as hell for them to figure it out on their own. Is this really a good model for Linux to adopt in the long run?
Certainly, no matter how many help files are included or intuitive features implemented into any OS there will still need to be some type of support structure. It just concerns me that ease of use would actually be contrary to a business model.
Another real quick example would be going back to Warrick's comments on Sendmail. My personal experience with Sendmail is limited at best, but from what I've seen there's a ton of stuff in there. I'd guess that it would take me several hours, if not days, to get this up and running properly being that I have no previous experience with it. On the other hand, I have set up IMail* on an NT Server for my company which I had up, running, and configured in about 20 minutes. That's 20 minutes without reading over any manuals or having any previous experience with it other than a basic understanding of POP and SMTP.
I don't mean to be picking on Sendmail as much as I am, especially considering it most likely has a lot more functionality than something like IMail. Thing is, IMail has a financial incentive to provide ease of use, where as Sendmail actually would lose money making things easier.
My apologies for not providing better examples here. The point I'm really trying to get at is whether or not selling software as a service rather than a product is a viable option for the future. Will it prove itself to be good for the computer industry as a whole? Is it still too early to tell, seeing as how the Linux community is just now really starting to focus on usability?
* I still use IMail as my company's E-Mail server after installing it a couple of years ago. Great stuff for doing mail on NT, and at $1000 it's actually one of the cheaper ones out there for that platform. Very stable and fast.
Well then, maybe you can explain to me why it is that the open source community gives Apple such an easy ride
That's a joke, right?
Is it? Think about what the reaction would be in Slashdot if the story that was posted was about Microsoft striking a deal with some OEM to bundle some hardware for them. Guarantee about half the postings would be theories on how MS is gunning for some other little company. If you hang around here any length of time you know what I'm talking about.
Furthermore, something along the lines of MS doing something with another company most likely wouldn't even have been posted on here. How many "Microsoft is doing something neat" stories do you see floating around here?
Apple gets into a possible deal with a vendor to supply video cards to their closed architecture, and the ooos, and ahhs kick into start with. Then the thread starts talking about the article itself. An MS article would have someone saying, "Everything they make is sh*t anyway, who cares?". There is an extreme difference in how one monopoly is treated versus the other.
The clones were faster and cheaper, because they took apple designed hardware and software, used cheaper components and cases, and were able to use the faster chips earlier because they were selling in smaller quantities. That isn't open competition, and it wasn't a good idea. If Apple hadn't quit licensing the clones, they would be gone, and there would be no Mac platform at all. But maybe that's what you wanted.
That's just plain silly to say that had the 3rd party clone makers continued that there would be no Mac platform. By your logic, if IBM didn't continue to make the PC it wouldn't exist as a platform either. As we can obviously see, not only did the PC continue on, but it innovated at a rate far greater than what IBM would have been able to do alone. We had thousands of businesses employing millions of people created from opening that platform. Perhaps Apple wouldn't be able to compete in such an open market, as IBM found it couldn't. Big freaking deal, I couldn't care less about whether the big player continues to retain complete control over everything. Getting IBM away from the PC opened it way up to innovation they couldn't keep up with, just like Apple found out when they opened up. They couldn't compete, so instead they slammed the lid down on these companies that were taking the ball and really running with it.
In the end game, an open platform is great for the consumer, and the economy as a whole. A closed system is only good for the one that controls it.
And USB would still suck if it weren't for Apple creating the market by making it the only way to add peripherals to the iMac. Innovation is more than just creating a new technology.
USB was devleoped primarily by Intel and Microsoft, and whether or not it came in a cherry flavored package, we would be seeing this come to market anyhow. Innovation is more than just cutesy marketing.
Apple is a much different company now. Pretty much the entire board of directors has been replaced, and most of their upper management came from NeXT.
Great to hear it. So I suppose this means that identical hardware on the Mac platform will no longer be 1/3 more expensive than PC hardware. Gone are the days of price gouging their monopoly on the Motorola platform? Cool! You might make me a fan of that egomaniac Jobs yet.
Like them or not, Apple was the one that introduced people to the idea that computers didn't need to be big boxes hidden under desks. Most of slashdot thinks it's absurd that anyone would want a colored computer, but the rest of the world obviously didn't. Witness the rush to knock-off the iMac's design. The second wave of iMac inspiration is arriving now with the so-called "legacy free" PC's. With their stylish casing, USB only expansion, and lack of floppy drives, etc they're obviously derived from the iMac original spirit.
You can't be serious. I ask for a single innovation from Apple and the best you can come up with is making the case a fashion statement? This is market leadership in the computer industry? You're right, you'd never get such innovative ideas as grape, cherry, and tangerine out of Linux or Microsoft folks. Oh God, where would we be without Apple's leadership!?
I think we're stuck on this one. Of course, anyone can take a design that Apple made and do it cheaper, because they don't need to pay all the money that goes into Apple's R&D budget. If those companies had to actually go through all the steps that apple did in the first place, and finance it, they would have lost their "cheaper" advantage quickly.
By the very same logic we'd still be in the way back days of name brand only computers, with companies like Apple "telling" us what we need. Innovation through complete control of the platform. Again, if this were Microsoft we were talking about folks would be up in arms! Thankfully, Apple has proven themselves repeatedly to be incapable of actually taking any real market share.
There's a lot of folks here who feel very strongly about the concept of open source software. Oddly enough, I'm not exactly one of them. I consider myself a supporter, but that's the extent of my feelings for it. What I truly believe is critical to the future of the computer industry is the continuation of an open hardware platform where a number of different vendors can compete on their merits. Thousands of companies rely upon this model, as does the open source movement. Apple's entire business model is wrapped around this closed architecture, now matter what tid bits of software they may let loose. Apple does what's good for Apple, and if it means destroying a couple of dozen upstart companies what's the big deal right?
Hey, is anyone keeping tabs on how many companies Microsoft has spurred into existance and how many they've bullied out? I'd love to see how that compares to the same numbers for Apple.
If there was value to having Apple around the computer industry still yet, the entire industry would be enjoying their innovations. The truth is, other than flavors and forgetting to install a floppy drive, they have been lagging the PC platform for years now. Heck, would they even exist still if it weren't for Microsoft and Adobe supplying them with applications?
Hey Moderators! Re:I don't like them. (Score:1, Offtopic) by um... Lucas (lk@caralis.com) on Saturday July 08, @07:49AM PST (#42)
Certainly me and um...Lucas there aren't in agreement in our positions, but he certainly isn't anywhere near off-topic. This thread is about the relative importance of this announcement, even if the announcement is itself a little off.
Mike Kerley is another beneficiary of IT study. He leveraged Microsoft training to transition from his role as a file supervisor in a law office to a new career as an IT consultant. Mike regularly flexes his new knowledge in the vast realm of end-user support utilizing advanced terminology like "Ummm, I think ya need to re-boot that" and "It could be your caps-lock key". He has learned to wiggle printer cables, change ribbons, and lick the ends of RJ45 jacks to get them to talk. It's people like Mike that make up the IT infrastructure that holds it all together. We at spam central salute you Mike.
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No, Titan is perfectly cool to dink with. We just can't play with Europa!
They've pretty much lost they're foothold on Windows over the years to MS's tools. By heavily supporting Linux and Mac they're filling a great niche that's been left open for far too long.
Another possible offshoot of this is having them seen as a great development platform to program for multiple OS's. If that becomes the case, they could make a serious run at MS's suite of tools. This is just good news all the way around. Hope Borland has the stuff to make it happen.
And my point is that for Linux to succeed, we'll have to forget our ethics.
I honestly couldn't agree with this post any more than I do. This hits a lot of nails on the head. Thing is, I do have a problem with your ethics argument. Perhaps this is nit picking, but as you stated, those reading this are the real spokesmen for Linux.
I believe that what you're trying to get at here is to put the focus on tangible functionality rather than the political aspects behind GNU and the FSF. This can, and must, include "ethical" behavior. Linux can continue maintain high ethics and focus on the needs of the end users both consumer and corporate.
What needs to be pulled out of the debate for now is the "politics" driving this. These arguments can return to the discussion at a point in time where it's been proven that this method of software development and distribution actually work over time. It would certainly give a lot more weight to the political side of this at that time.
Anyhow, keep up the rants!!
A couple of corrections I just have to make, even after your disclaimer. Please note, most of what I'm about to get into here was derived from "Triumph of the Nerds". This is a MUST view for folks involved with the PC industry IMHO.
First off, when IBM needed an OS, not only did MS not have one, they didn't want anything to do with making one. They initially referred IBM to the fella who wrote CPM, whose name escapes me at the moment. This fella refused to sign IBM's NDA, so IBM was back to MS for a solution which they didn't have. Have to keep in mind, MS had a great reputation at the time for development languages, but that was all.
So MS could sell there development stuff for this new PC coming out they found this fella who worked at a computer store in the area who had written a little app called QD-Dos (Quick & Dirty Dos). This fella had essentially created a knock-off of CPM. It was roughly the equivalent of what XML is to SGML in that it was a subset of simpler commands. MS offered this guy $50,000 for all rights to it, then went about hacking the heck out of it.
There is certainly a good bit more to the story, and it makes for a fascinating video. I believe the transcripts of this series are still up on PBS's site if you are so inclined.
For the record, NT's support for the older 16-bit apps isn't too far away from how Wine implements this for Linux. NT pretty much has seperate machine that gets started up for 16-bit apps in order to maintain compatibility. It's not a great solution, as it still leaves a lot of older apps out in the cold, and to the best of my knowledge provides no backwards driver support. It is definitely not part of NT's core system.
As for all them blue screens, I'd like to know what folks are doing to those boxes to get them to do that. I run NT Workstation as my primary desktop, and I provide support for several other NT Workstations. I've found it to be extremely stable for up to weeks or months at a time. Darn near the only thing that causes me to have to re-boot is an IE lockup or a power out. After running a Linux box side by side with this NT, I've found them both to be quite stable, and I've managed to also lock them both up.
On the server side, I wouldn't hesitate to implement an NT as a LAN server for file and print sharing again. Here again, I've found it to be quite a nice platform for this. For the web, Unix all the way baby! I don't have a single kind word for IIS, and I've got plenty of reasons to back it up. Stability is but one of them. This rant is running long, so I'll save my IIS bashing for later.
For an ecommerce site, speed of page handling and cgi calls is important, but so is getting that customer through the checkout aisle. What kinds of performance gains might be seen when comparing https pages between Apache and Apache+Tux?
I doubt that this was an original, but it was one that a friend of mine likes to use.
"However right or wrong a zealot might be, the fact is that this person is still a zealot."
This is one of the reasons I always refer folks to local vendors who actually build PC's from stock parts. Only under threat of mild torture (low pain threshold and all) would I ever recommend a person to go purchase a brand name PC.
From my personal experience, a user purchasing brand name PC's will eventually regret it. Usually within 6 months to a year. Buying brand name is nothing more than a hardware trap providing for only a very narrow upgrade path, if one exists at all.
In short, dodge the Windows tax by not buying from those vendors that signed up for MS's restrictive licensing. Recommend to those that trust your opinion to do the same, and you to can "Take a Bite Outta Crime".
Microsoft has never had any real innovations
Although I rather appreciate your fairly even handed tone to your post, I think this point is getting over blown. It's a point that I feel needs to be addressed with a bit more reality, oddly enough for the sake of Linux and open source in general.
Microsoft has done one thing that no other computer company or organization has even approached accomplishing. They developed an OS that can support an extremely wide range of hardware, and brought computing to what you would refer to as the average user. Sun, IBM and Apple all rolled together haven't accomplished half of what MS has in this regard. This keeps getting referred to as something trivial, when it's anything but. Linux is still going through the pains of trying to get all these various hardware drivers to play nice together, and to work in OEM support for them. There's obviously still quite a bit of work yet to be done to bring Linux to the desktop as well.
Point is, MS has a lot of good and bad about them. They're a big company that does a lot of stuff, or course there's going to be a lot of aspects to them. To constantly only focusing in on just the bad limits you to only learning half the lessons that a company like MS can provide.
Disclaimer:
This is not meant to be a pro-MS post. There is a bigger picture here than "MS Sucks" and I just find it unfortunate that so many folks around here can't see that. Sorry for picking on you SoftwareJanitor, there are certainly folks far worse than yourself in what I'm talking about here.
Frankly, I don't really care if CSE, CSIS, FBI, NSA, CIA, KKK, FSB, - whoever - reads my mail.
Frankly, I don't care that the National Socialists are taking Jews off to live in camps. I'm not Jewish, so this has very little impact on me.
So it seems they're arresting people who have spoken out against them. I don't speak out, so this has little impact on me.
Oh, now they've got a party member assigned to every social club in the country. I don't belong to any of those, so this doesn't impact me either.
...Shall I go on?
What you're thinking about could only be implemented if the FBI's box were aware of what IP was being handed out to which phone number. Even then, if the caller has blocked his caller id then that would fail as well.
The only way to just drop a box in to sniff would be to sniff everything that is moving across that ISP's network. Even if the ISP was using a static IP for that customer, the FBI box would still have to be exposed to all the rest of that network's traffic. It's the nature of the beast.
Far as I'm concerned, the FBI should not be granted the authority to enter a private business to do snooping. If they want to get at a specific person, they should have to do so by tapping their phone line at their home or office, just like the days of old. Private enterprises should not be at the whim of criminal investigations, warrant or not.
Why should electronic communication be legally less protected than telephone communication?
I'll do ya one better. Why shouldn't a letter sent via electronic means not enjoy the same protections as a letter sent by the post office? Correct me if I'm wrong here, but tapping into a phone line isn't a federal offense, where as opening someone's postal mail most certainly is.
This is NOT wiretapping folks. This is the process of ripping open your sealed envelopes. Worse yet, it rips all of them open with only a flimsy promise to only look at the letters in question. The FBI does not have a great track record for being trusted to abide by only playing by the rules of a search warrant.
The really amazing thing is, America's founding fathers saw this very thing coming. The 4th amendment was not an after thought. It was put in to deliberately undermine tyranny within the nation they were building.
It's a science story discussing the economic and political issues dealing with space travel. Just a couple of messages in, and there's the obligatory Microsoft slam.
Yup, smells like troll spirit to me!
Wow, quite a rant! I'm not quite there with you on the tone it was delivered in, but I agree with the basic point you're trying to get at.
/. really need to be covering this stuff, both the good and bad.
As I've begun to post more frequently around here I keep finding myself in the position of defending Microsoft. Thing is, in the off-line world I'm usually the first one in line to give them a hard time, especially concerning Internet technologies.
I don't think of myself as being two-faced or hypocritical in my opinions on this. I firmly believe in giving credit where it's due, and pointing out flaws where they exist. In so doing, I don't fit neatly into any of the on-line cliques that form up around product lines. Perhaps it's this aspect of the whole "Everything MS Sucks" crowd that appeals to many of the folks around here.
The importance of Linux taking market share seems to keep getting lost on a lot of folks. The battle isn't over releasing the source code of every bit of software. The real battle is to get enough Linux and other alternate OS's out there to insure that the entire computer industry HAS to rely on open standards to survive. As citizens of a much large community than just Open Source or FSF we all need to keep this in mind.
Here's where I'm gonna get skewered here, but MS brings a lot of cool stuff to the table. They're directly involved with darn near every standards body that has the possibility of making a difference to what the future holds for the whole of the industry. Heck, they had a huge part in helping build this industry from the very beginnings of the very first PC. Sites like
There's a lot to be learned from Microsoft that seems to get lost on the Open Source crowd. Yes, they've done some stupid things, but if that's all you can see then you've got some serious side blinders on. I personally love the "NT crashes every 5 minutes" posts. I've got enough experience with NT to know one hell of a lot better, and to also know where NT truly does fall short. What I find odd is how you never see those NT crashing posts in the same thread as some fella bouncing his Linux distro hard due to a bad make.
For whatever reasons, it's cooler to just be a zealot than to evaluate based on merits.
To do what this article suggests would open up all kinds of legal nastiness for Microsoft when it's quite apparent their lawyers are needed elsewhere. Ahh, but what if this idea really appealled to Microsoft, then what would they do between wanting to do it, and having legal ramifications?
Get somebody else to do it for them!!
Document the heck out of whatever interface talks to this thing, and provide it to a couple of smaller hardware companies, possibly some new upstarts. With the possibility of making the doohicky that gets tacked on to an MS console selling to millions of folks, you'd bet there'd be folks in line to do this.
Once all the legalities have been fought out by the wee upstart, draining them of any capitol they may have been able to put together from actually selling products, big friendly MS swoops in and buys them out. Everybody wins but the competition, and all it cost to MS was a little extra documentation and a possible loophole in their licensing.
Some day I want to run my own evil company! <audio src="evillaughter.mp3">
that apple is no better, no worse than ms when it comes to ur: Mshing their pack to trained lawyers
Ummm, when was the last time Microsoft shut down rumors about one of their upcoming products? Let's give some credit where credit is due, Apple is well ahead of the game for this particular issue.
Are you saying you could set this all up and support it for a company then? Perhaps you are one of the uber-geeks that actually has enough networking, hardware, and software knowledge to bring all the pieces together. That, and you've got enough free time to support it.
Fact is, for the very same reasons you mentioned, this is GREAT news for Linux. If you've ever had any experience at all with determining the price of a product or service you would know that under valueing can be just as detrimental to sales as over valueing. Yes, you can actually hurt your sales by having the customer get into the "so why is it so cheap" way of thinking.
Another thing you seem to completely overlook is the fact that these "Big Dumb Companies" are reinvesting a lot back into the open source community. Hell, this site we're on now has been helped to scale to it's fullest potential in a way that would be impossible as a hobby project.
It's a shame you can't see past the bedroom wall behind your monitor.
Seems to me that Rambus is acting in a perfectly legal manner based on what rights they have been granted by the patent office. While these companies go about fighting eachother over who owns what, it seems that a larger picture is being missed.
Why isn't the Patent Office held accountable for questionable patents that result in millions of dollars of legal fees? If anyone should be getting sued here, it should be those people that granted this virtually unlimited monopoly power to a company like Rambus for a technology that they didn't invent.
Until those that issue bad patents are truly held accountable for not doing the research needed to insure good patents, then we're just going to go through this same problem over and over again. Doesn't matter if we're talking about Amazon, Rambus, or Microsoft. There desperately needs to be a check and balance that doesn't involve lining the pockets of even more lawyers.
I for one love working where I do. I like all the people, and the management is really swell.
Metrol - (Nick provided for tracking purposes)
Actually, if you structure it right, you have an incentive to make it as good as possible. Imagine that you do yearly support contracts (vs per incident). Now, the fewer times people call, the more of that money you make. So, your incentive is to make it really good so people don't call, then sell the support contracts. Of course, you have to price the yearly support contracts such that they will buy them on the chance that they need it, but that's implementation detail.
The thing to figure out here is whether or not someone would purchase a support contract if the product was simple to use. In your example, the product in question hasn't forced a tech to get on the phone to call for help in a year's time. Would you renew a support contract for something this easy to use, or figure on it being cheaper in the long run to pay for per incident support?
The next logical step here is figuring out what kind of revenue you could pull in from a per incident style of billing for support. Again, making something easier to use plays heavily against this as well.
I'd guess that around a year from now we'll have a good idea as to what the answer to my question is. We'll be seeing which companies based around an open source model survive, and what level of usability they offer. I do sincerely hope that my concerns are unfounded, but unless I'm missing some basic component to the economics of this, usability is the last thing that an open source company would want.
One part of this article has actually been on my mind for a little while now. How do you base a business around selling a service for the product you sell and still encourage usability? If we were to take RedHat for example, it would seem that an ideal market for them would be tons of folks with RH Linux running, and making it as hard as hell for them to figure it out on their own. Is this really a good model for Linux to adopt in the long run?
Certainly, no matter how many help files are included or intuitive features implemented into any OS there will still need to be some type of support structure. It just concerns me that ease of use would actually be contrary to a business model.
Another real quick example would be going back to Warrick's comments on Sendmail. My personal experience with Sendmail is limited at best, but from what I've seen there's a ton of stuff in there. I'd guess that it would take me several hours, if not days, to get this up and running properly being that I have no previous experience with it. On the other hand, I have set up IMail* on an NT Server for my company which I had up, running, and configured in about 20 minutes. That's 20 minutes without reading over any manuals or having any previous experience with it other than a basic understanding of POP and SMTP.
I don't mean to be picking on Sendmail as much as I am, especially considering it most likely has a lot more functionality than something like IMail. Thing is, IMail has a financial incentive to provide ease of use, where as Sendmail actually would lose money making things easier.
My apologies for not providing better examples here. The point I'm really trying to get at is whether or not selling software as a service rather than a product is a viable option for the future. Will it prove itself to be good for the computer industry as a whole? Is it still too early to tell, seeing as how the Linux community is just now really starting to focus on usability?
* I still use IMail as my company's E-Mail server after installing it a couple of years ago. Great stuff for doing mail on NT, and at $1000 it's actually one of the cheaper ones out there for that platform. Very stable and fast.
Is it? Think about what the reaction would be in Slashdot if the story that was posted was about Microsoft striking a deal with some OEM to bundle some hardware for them. Guarantee about half the postings would be theories on how MS is gunning for some other little company. If you hang around here any length of time you know what I'm talking about.
Furthermore, something along the lines of MS doing something with another company most likely wouldn't even have been posted on here. How many "Microsoft is doing something neat" stories do you see floating around here?
Apple gets into a possible deal with a vendor to supply video cards to their closed architecture, and the ooos, and ahhs kick into start with. Then the thread starts talking about the article itself. An MS article would have someone saying, "Everything they make is sh*t anyway, who cares?". There is an extreme difference in how one monopoly is treated versus the other.
Short answer, not a joke.
The clones were faster and cheaper, because they took apple designed hardware and software, used cheaper components and cases, and were able to use the faster chips earlier because they were selling in smaller quantities. That isn't open competition, and it wasn't a good idea. If Apple hadn't quit licensing the clones, they would be gone, and there would be no Mac platform at all. But maybe that's what you wanted.
That's just plain silly to say that had the 3rd party clone makers continued that there would be no Mac platform. By your logic, if IBM didn't continue to make the PC it wouldn't exist as a platform either. As we can obviously see, not only did the PC continue on, but it innovated at a rate far greater than what IBM would have been able to do alone. We had thousands of businesses employing millions of people created from opening that platform. Perhaps Apple wouldn't be able to compete in such an open market, as IBM found it couldn't. Big freaking deal, I couldn't care less about whether the big player continues to retain complete control over everything. Getting IBM away from the PC opened it way up to innovation they couldn't keep up with, just like Apple found out when they opened up. They couldn't compete, so instead they slammed the lid down on these companies that were taking the ball and really running with it.
In the end game, an open platform is great for the consumer, and the economy as a whole. A closed system is only good for the one that controls it.
And USB would still suck if it weren't for Apple creating the market by making it the only way to add peripherals to the iMac. Innovation is more than just creating a new technology.
USB was devleoped primarily by Intel and Microsoft, and whether or not it came in a cherry flavored package, we would be seeing this come to market anyhow. Innovation is more than just cutesy marketing.
Apple is a much different company now. Pretty much the entire board of directors has been replaced, and most of their upper management came from NeXT.
Great to hear it. So I suppose this means that identical hardware on the Mac platform will no longer be 1/3 more expensive than PC hardware. Gone are the days of price gouging their monopoly on the Motorola platform? Cool! You might make me a fan of that egomaniac Jobs yet.
Like them or not, Apple was the one that introduced people to the idea that computers didn't need to be big boxes hidden under desks. Most of slashdot thinks it's absurd that anyone would want a colored computer, but the rest of the world obviously didn't. Witness the rush to knock-off the iMac's design. The second wave of iMac inspiration is arriving now with the so-called "legacy free" PC's. With their stylish casing, USB only expansion, and lack of floppy drives, etc they're obviously derived from the iMac original spirit.
You can't be serious. I ask for a single innovation from Apple and the best you can come up with is making the case a fashion statement? This is market leadership in the computer industry? You're right, you'd never get such innovative ideas as grape, cherry, and tangerine out of Linux or Microsoft folks. Oh God, where would we be without Apple's leadership!?
I think we're stuck on this one. Of course, anyone can take a design that Apple made and do it cheaper, because they don't need to pay all the money that goes into Apple's R&D budget. If those companies had to actually go through all the steps that apple did in the first place, and finance it, they would have lost their "cheaper" advantage quickly.
By the very same logic we'd still be in the way back days of name brand only computers, with companies like Apple "telling" us what we need. Innovation through complete control of the platform. Again, if this were Microsoft we were talking about folks would be up in arms! Thankfully, Apple has proven themselves repeatedly to be incapable of actually taking any real market share.
There's a lot of folks here who feel very strongly about the concept of open source software. Oddly enough, I'm not exactly one of them. I consider myself a supporter, but that's the extent of my feelings for it. What I truly believe is critical to the future of the computer industry is the continuation of an open hardware platform where a number of different vendors can compete on their merits. Thousands of companies rely upon this model, as does the open source movement. Apple's entire business model is wrapped around this closed architecture, now matter what tid bits of software they may let loose. Apple does what's good for Apple, and if it means destroying a couple of dozen upstart companies what's the big deal right?
Hey, is anyone keeping tabs on how many companies Microsoft has spurred into existance and how many they've bullied out? I'd love to see how that compares to the same numbers for Apple.
If there was value to having Apple around the computer industry still yet, the entire industry would be enjoying their innovations. The truth is, other than flavors and forgetting to install a floppy drive, they have been lagging the PC platform for years now. Heck, would they even exist still if it weren't for Microsoft and Adobe supplying them with applications?
Hey Moderators!
Re:I don't like them. (Score:1, Offtopic)
by um... Lucas (lk@caralis.com) on Saturday July 08, @07:49AM PST (#42)
Certainly me and um...Lucas there aren't in agreement in our positions, but he certainly isn't anywhere near off-topic. This thread is about the relative importance of this announcement, even if the announcement is itself a little off.
Mike Kerley is another beneficiary of IT study. He leveraged Microsoft training to transition from his role as a file supervisor in a law office to a new career as an IT consultant. Mike regularly flexes his new knowledge in the vast realm of end-user support utilizing advanced terminology like "Ummm, I think ya need to re-boot that" and "It could be your caps-lock key". He has learned to wiggle printer cables, change ribbons, and lick the ends of RJ45 jacks to get them to talk. It's people like Mike that make up the IT infrastructure that holds it all together. We at spam central salute you Mike.