Show me where it says I hate them. What I said is that their accomplishments are highly overrated. Even if I do hate Bill Gates, why would that make me some kind of bad person who would hate puppies? Frankly, Bill just isn't the sort that I would equate with a puppy, in fact I can't think of any animal that I would disrespect by comparing them with Bill. Animals live by instinct, while it is obvious that all of Bill's actions are strictly intentional. I really don't personally hate Bill Gates. I hate what he does. I don't know him personally, but from what I've seen he doesn't seem like a very nice person. If Bill would turn things around and act in a manner that was ethical, I would be willing to change my opinions.
As for impartiality, I don't think anyone ever promised that from Slashdot. I don't know how you could judge against Slashdot for that given that you certainly can't expect impartiality from Microsoft either. I don't see much evidence that the Slashdot community on the whole makes any pretense that it is anything other than mostly pro-Linux (and *BSD and *nix in general) and mostly anti-Microsoft.
You are thanking Bill for something he doesn't deserve credit for. There is no way that the closed Mac would have become the dominant hardware platform. Apple wasn't always closed, the Apple II family was as open if not more open than the PC (it came with schematics and disassembly listings of the monitor ROM). The PC would have taken off (if for no other reason than it came from IBM) with or without Bill. Hardware will only be competitive as long as Microsoft is not a major player. They are already into input devices and a few other bits of the hardware business, how long do you think it will be before an unchecked Microsoft decides they want a bigger piece of the pie? As for competitiveness, before Microsoft forged the big Wintel alliance, there were many different competitive architectures (all the 8-bit systems, Mac, Amiga, Atari ST, etc). There is less real competitiveness in a lot of ways in the hardware world now than before Microsoft. In some ways it is a danger that we have essentially put all of our eggs into the "IBM PC clone" architecture basket. There are some parts of the PC architecture that we are more or less stuck with that are painfully klunky.
Dont care if you like him or not but he changed the world of computing as we know it.
(for the better or worse I dont know)
My vote is definitely for worse. I can't think of anything positive that Microsoft has done for the industry. Every good thing I can think of that is attributed to them is stuff that other people did that they are taking credit for, or stuff that would have happened sooner or later (often sooner) without them.
All that sounds really great. Until you get audited and the IRS decides to disallow all of those deductions. May not ever happen, but they do that to people sometimes. My tax accountant advised me against trying to do that sort of thing unless I was basically self employed full-time.
Let's see if I get a similar letter from IDG now. I wonder if IDG knows the difference between a web discussion forum and a 'chat room'. While one can understand legitimate defense of trademarks, no rational person who saw a message on a mailing list like that would think that the author was intending to infringe upon IDG's trademark in this case. Unfortunately this type of taking things too far seems to happen too often. The logical conclusion is either that there are a lot of irrational people out there or that people just plain don't get it.
While the Cisco products are damned good, they are fairly expensive. There are other 100Mbit switches out there that will work fine that are considerably cheaper.
Run fastether (preferrably 3com) cards in EVERY node
While your advice to use 100MBit NICs is correct, you might want to rethink your suggestion of brand. Look at what the people who are building big Beowulf clusters are using. Its usually Tulip chipset based cards. I don't know if more recent models are better or if the drivers have gotten better lately, but not that long ago the general consensus seemed to be that 3Com 100Mbit cards were reliable but disappointing performers. At any rate, you can get a Tulip (or PNIC) based card like the D-Link DFE-500TX, the Bay Networks NetGear FA310TX, or the LinkSys (forget the model number -- they make two 10/100 cards, one of which is a semi-NE2000 clone and should be avoided, the other uses a PNIC2 and is the one to get) for under $50, whereas the 3C905 series cards are generally $70+.
Wouldn't that be a problematic combination, as Linux (Unix) Netscape normally crashes every few mintes ?
I've got a netscape 4.6 session on my home Linux box that has been running for weeks, and it gets daily use. So if you are getting crashes every few minutes you must have something screwed up on your system or something.
Doug Michels shouldn't be expected to say anything else, but I don't see how he can expect anyone who has seriously used or evaluated both SCO's products (OpenServer and Unixware) and Red Hat's product. Obviously he is speaking to PHB's who don't know enough to dismiss his argument outright.
Certainly in price/performance, there can be little dispute that Red Hat beats SCO for commercial use in all but the most extreme circumstances. SCO's products are very expensive if you purchase all of their debundled pieces that it takes to match what you get in a Red Hat box for under $100. Let alone user based license fees. And even if you purchase all of SCO's commercial offerings, you still end up having to add a significant amount of open source to really make it comparable to Red Hat's offering, and that is all extra work.
Michel's point about Red Hat not adding extra value is misleading. It doesn't matter whether Red Hat themselves add value (as opposed to other Linux vendors such as SuSE or Caldera), but what the overall value of the package is. There is no doubt in my mind that the overall package from Red Hat for most people has a much higher value than what you get from SCO, and at a small fraction of the price.
The company I work for is using Java and making pretty strong commitments to it in the future. However, what we do is in-house development and very specialized, so you won't see it unless you work for us.
We haven't run into that many platform problems, although the range of platforms we need to support is fairly limited. We are also mainly using it for applications and servlets, not for applets.
As for speed, for most things it has been adequate, although I am currently running into a few problems on one project. I am not sure its the Java code or the database (most of the CPU usage seems to be in the database).
Netcraft has information on how their numbers are generated on their pages if you are curious.
There are undoubtedly some Linux users doing virtual hosting, but my guess is that most of the really large virtual servers are being run on big iron like Solaris. Linux is obviously more popular with smaller hosting sites that likely have fewer domains per machine. I'd guess that the average number of IPs for Linux web servers is closer to 1 than 2.
Most of the large hosting sites that use an Apache derivative (like CnG and Rapidsite) have changed the identity string so that they are no longer counted on Netcraft as 'Apache', which means that the numbers are not likely to be off by as much as you seem to be implying.
There is really no way to know for sure how much that multiple IP's per machine might affect the netcraft numbers, but if it is more than a few percent when spread across four million Apache servers checked by Netcraft, I'd be surprised.
I don't think there is any significant amount of fudging going on. What it comes down to is that I doubt that a very large percentage of Linux users have even heard of the counter. A lot of people who have only heard of it may not know how to find it. May be too busy, lazy or apathetic to register. May be too paranoid to give out any of their personal information, etc...
I'd be surprised if more than 2 or 3% of Linux users have registered.
I've been using Linux continually since the 0.99pl7 kernel was state of the art. It has been my primary computing platform for nearly as long (since 0.99pl14).
My guess is that there are more than 120,000 Linux boxes continuously on the net acting as web servers. NetCraft counts over four million web servers running Apache. Estimates I've seen say that at least 1/3 of the Apache based servers on the net are running Linux. Personally I believe that number to be conservative, but even if only 10% of the Apache servers on the net are Linux based, its over 400,000. And that isn't even considering that some Linux based web servers are running Stronghold, Zeus, Roxen, AOLServer, Netscape Fastrack, or something else.
My guess is that only about 1 in 5 Linux boxes are actually used to run a web server on the publicly accessable Internet. If that is true, then I'd say that 2 million would be a bottom number for the number of hard-core Linux users.
I don't think the 10-12 million numbers are at all out of line if they include casual, occasional and part-time users.
Slashdot has banner ads too. Shouldn't people get worked up about that too (just to be consistent, I mean).
People did, when Slashdot first started putting them on. I still see an occasional post mumbling about how wonderful junkbuster is at filtering out 'Rob's damned banner ads' or somesuch.
If he doesn't want to keep a Windows box (like he is short of desk space) I wonder what the likelyhood that any of these Windows-only tools will run under Wine?
Otherwise another option might be Bochs or VMware (which a number of other people have suggested).
I punched 'oracle' into the search box on freshmeat.net and got back a whole slew of hits, several of which sound like possibilities for what this guy is asking for, and probably a few others that might be other interesting tools for him to look at.
From what I've heard, AT&T (formerly TCI) started forcing non-business-rate cable modem customers towards NAT just recently, prior to that they were doing DHCP with real IPs for most users, and the IP's were fairly close to static. From what I've heard they are billing a move towards agressively changing IPs even for DHCP users as a 'security feature' as is how they are billing the move towards NAT. It is my understanding that the only way you will be able to get a true static IP from them in the future will be to pay for their business grade service.
As for DSL service, part of your quality and speed experience may depend on which ISP you use (since with DSL you have a choice and with cable you don't). US Worst seems to get the most dings in that area, and there are rumors that they may be moving towards forcing NAT on people also. I am using one of the other providers, and I have seen what I would consider good speed. I am paying for the 256kb connection and I generally see better than 400kb (50KB) download speed even from busy sites like netscape.com, and that is going through my underpowered (P75, 48M) squid proxy server and using Netscape as an FTP client (which isn't the most efficient). Upline speed is generally only slightly slower than the downline speed. I've also seen aggregate downline bandwidth usage of around 512kb when doing multiple transfers at once.
It will be interesting to see how well AT&T does in building up their infrastructure (like splitting cable modem network segments to reduce shared bandwidth congestion) as they add more customers. One other advantage to living on the poor side of town is that much fewer of my neighbors probably have cable modems than in the more afluent western suburbs.
As for distance, you must really be right on the edge of your service area. I am about 2.5 or so miles from the central office and while they wouldn't give me 512kb service here, I've had no troubles with 256kb service.
I ended up rewiring my house with all new Cat5 wiring, only to find out that the damned water company had some goofy automated meter reader sitting on the old wiring that was messing up the signal. Of course I also noticed an improvement in the sound quality in my voice line after rewiring, so I am not unhappy with the situation there.
One of my reasons for going with DSL is I was able to keep my existing (Linux friendly) ISP. I like the fact that myst ISP knows, and doesn't mind if I am running server processes. Another reason was because I was never happy with TCI as a cable vendor (I bought a DSS dish to get rid of them).
As for the cost issue, I expect that eventually US Worst will be forced reduce their pricing to be more competitive with AT&T. I don't really expect that to happen until both of them get the ability to wire every household in their market areas though.
In the long run you are right about needing fiber to the house, but I won't hold my breath waiting.
Rural areas generally don't have cable service because the density doesn't pay off well enough for cable companies to put in the wire. Current DSL hardware has a limit of approximately 3 miles from the central office, which also rules it out for most rural customers.
However, you are wrong about poor neighborhoods getting lousy access, at least where I live. I live on the 'wrong side of the tracks' -- the poor east side of the town (of approx 300,000 population) I live in. I had my choice of either DSL or cable modem (I chose DSL, because I run server processes and the cable company basically makes that impossible through use of NAT for anyone who isn't paying big bucks for their 'business grade' service). I also had no troubles using a 56k modem.
On the other hand, most of the people I work with live in the ritzy western suburbs, and all of the new development areas generally are on digital multiplexers, which means that DSL is just plain unavailable, and also means that they generally have trouble connecting at 56k (some report that they can't get higher than 26.6 even in a new house and with a good modem like a USR Courier). Many of those on the west side who are not on digital multiplexers are too far from their central office to get DSL. Being in an old neighborhood around here means it is much more likely you have a nice copper wire all the way back to the central office and more likely you are close enough to the central office to get DSL. Furthermore, large parts of the western suburbs don't even have digital cable service yet (which is a prerequisite for cable modem access). The reason for this is that the cable company is having trouble installing the infrastructure to get service out to all of the new development on the west side.
So the reality is that it is not necessarily true that poor neighborhoods will get lousy access.
Its not that big business probably wouldn't like to ignore the poorer areas... In this case the realities of infrastructure availability just happen to favor the poorer areas.
If you don't like consolidation, you can always help deconsolidate things by creating your own opensource discussion venue. You don't even have to do the coding, as there is software you can download.
Speaking as a programmer that has been doing a lot of Java development lately, this is very good news. The fact that 'official' Sun blessing has been given to a Java for Linux should help to make Linux more saleable to the PNB types as a Java development and/or deployment platform.
One difference is that I haven't seen any evidence that the other companies resorted to paying huge donations to politicians in order to get the DOJ to take action against Microsoft. I also haven't seen any evidence that the other companies used politicians that they had funded to try to influence the budgets of agencies that were doing things that would influence their businesses.
There is a difference here in which companies are doing lobbying in a way that is ethical, and what Microsoft is doing. I am continually surprised by the lengths that Microsoft apologists will go to bend over far enough to make it look like what Microsoft is doing is no different than what other companies do. Even though it is sometimes true that individual actions by Microsoft may not be that much further than what other companies have done, I can't think of any company who so consistantly and determinedly pushes the boundaries of ethical behavior in so many ways. Even the IBM of the 70's and 80's who also found itself involved with anti-trust proceedings in general seemed to conduct themselves in a less ethically challenged way than Microsoft does. IBM has gone a long way towards cleaning up their kitchen, and lets hope that Microsoft can and will follow their example and work towards becoming a good, clean corporate citizen.
I have no less than four different models of SCSI CD-ROM drive (Toshiba, Sony & two varieties of Panasonic), and no less than six different SCSI cards (Adaptec 1540B (ISA), Adaptec 1540CF (ISA), Adaptec 2840A (VLB), Future Domain 950 (8 bit ISA), Future Domain 1860 (ISA) and NCR/Symbios Logic 53C810A (PCI). I have never had any troubles with Linux recognizing CD-ROM drives on any Linux kernel, and I've been using Linux since 0.99pl7.
If you work in the financial services industry like I do. It has been clear to me for a long time that Microsoft wants to skim the cream off of all the financial services industry. They want to cut into the business of MasterCard, Visa, etc. They want to cut into the general banking, mortgage, etc. business. In the future most financial transactions will be done at least partially online, and if we aren't careful, Microsoft will be getting a piece of every transaction.
What irks me is that management just doesn't see Microsoft as a competitor. We shouldn't be buying any of our competitor's products, because we are funding Microsoft to move into our own markets.
I'm afraid they won't see it until it is too late.
Microsoft talked tough to competitors, but generally backed down when their bluff was called. That, folks, is what is known as ordinary business practices.
That is called bully tactics at best, and if its ordinary business, then business should be ashamed of itself. And even if it is common, it doesn't mean that the industry shouldn't fight against unethical and/or illegal practices when they happen.
For example, Microsoft threatened to withold Windows 95 from IBM. IBM didn't budge from their position. Microsoft backed down.
IBM is one of the few companies that is big enough and powerful enough that they can play hardball with Microsoft. IBM also has a track record of playing dirty (although they seem to have significantly cleaned up their act in the past few years), which they also have spent significant time in court with the government over.
In any case, Microsoft may have eventually backed down, but they did manage to stick IBM with more expensive licensing than some of the other competitors were paying, and they also delayed giving IBM access to Windows 95 long enough that it was a competitive disadvantage for IBM.
One minor correction... the last three paragraphs should not be italicized. I must have missed a closing tag. Sorry for any confusion this might cause...
Slashdot Mirror
Show me where it says I hate them. What I said is that their accomplishments are highly overrated. Even if I do hate Bill Gates, why would that make me some kind of bad person who would hate puppies? Frankly, Bill just isn't the sort that I would equate with a puppy, in fact I can't think of any animal that I would disrespect by comparing them with Bill. Animals live by instinct, while it is obvious that all of Bill's actions are strictly intentional. I really don't personally hate Bill Gates. I hate what he does. I don't know him personally, but from what I've seen he doesn't seem like a very nice person. If Bill would turn things around and act in a manner that was ethical, I would be willing to change my opinions.
As for impartiality, I don't think anyone ever promised that from Slashdot. I don't know how you could judge against Slashdot for that given that you certainly can't expect impartiality from Microsoft either. I don't see much evidence that the Slashdot community on the whole makes any pretense that it is anything other than mostly pro-Linux (and *BSD and *nix in general) and mostly anti-Microsoft.
You are thanking Bill for something he doesn't deserve credit for. There is no way that the closed Mac would have become the dominant hardware platform. Apple wasn't always closed, the Apple II family was as open if not more open than the PC (it came with schematics and disassembly listings of the monitor ROM). The PC would have taken off (if for no other reason than it came from IBM) with or without Bill. Hardware will only be competitive as long as Microsoft is not a major player. They are already into input devices and a few other bits of the hardware business, how long do you think it will be before an unchecked Microsoft decides they want a bigger piece of the pie? As for competitiveness, before Microsoft forged the big Wintel alliance, there were many different competitive architectures (all the 8-bit systems, Mac, Amiga, Atari ST, etc). There is less real competitiveness in a lot of ways in the hardware world now than before Microsoft. In some ways it is a danger that we have essentially put all of our eggs into the "IBM PC clone" architecture basket. There are some parts of the PC architecture that we are more or less stuck with that are painfully klunky.
Dont care if you like him or not but he changed the world of computing as we know it.
(for the better or worse I dont know)
My vote is definitely for worse. I can't think of anything positive that Microsoft has done for the industry. Every good thing I can think of that is attributed to them is stuff that other people did that they are taking credit for, or stuff that would have happened sooner or later (often sooner) without them.
All that sounds really great. Until you get audited and the IRS decides to disallow all of those deductions. May not ever happen, but they do that to people sometimes. My tax accountant advised me against trying to do that sort of thing unless I was basically self employed full-time.
Let's see if I get a similar letter from IDG now. I wonder if IDG knows the difference between a web discussion forum and a 'chat room'. While one can understand legitimate defense of trademarks, no rational person who saw a message on a mailing list like that would think that the author was intending to infringe upon IDG's trademark in this case. Unfortunately this type of taking things too far seems to happen too often. The logical conclusion is either that there are a lot of irrational people out there or that people just plain don't get it.
I recommend a Cisco Catalyst 100Mbit switch
While the Cisco products are damned good, they are fairly expensive. There are other 100Mbit switches out there that will work fine that are considerably cheaper.
Run fastether (preferrably 3com) cards in EVERY node
While your advice to use 100MBit NICs is correct, you might want to rethink your suggestion of brand. Look at what the people who are building big Beowulf clusters are using. Its usually Tulip chipset based cards. I don't know if more recent models are better or if the drivers have gotten better lately, but not that long ago the general consensus seemed to be that 3Com 100Mbit cards were reliable but disappointing performers. At any rate, you can get a Tulip (or PNIC) based card like the D-Link DFE-500TX, the Bay Networks NetGear FA310TX, or the LinkSys (forget the model number -- they make two 10/100 cards, one of which is a semi-NE2000 clone and should be avoided, the other uses a PNIC2 and is the one to get) for under $50, whereas the 3C905 series cards are generally $70+.
Wouldn't that be a problematic combination, as Linux (Unix) Netscape normally crashes every few mintes ?
I've got a netscape 4.6 session on my home Linux box that has been running for weeks, and it gets daily use. So if you are getting crashes every few minutes you must have something screwed up on your system or something.
Doug Michels shouldn't be expected to say anything else, but I don't see how he can expect anyone who has seriously used or evaluated both SCO's products (OpenServer and Unixware) and Red Hat's product. Obviously he is speaking to PHB's who don't know enough to dismiss his argument outright.
Certainly in price/performance, there can be little dispute that Red Hat beats SCO for commercial use in all but the most extreme circumstances. SCO's products are very expensive if you purchase all of their debundled pieces that it takes to match what you get in a Red Hat box for under $100. Let alone user based license fees. And even if you purchase all of SCO's commercial offerings, you still end up having to add a significant amount of open source to really make it comparable to Red Hat's offering, and that is all extra work.
Michel's point about Red Hat not adding extra value is misleading. It doesn't matter whether Red Hat themselves add value (as opposed to other Linux vendors such as SuSE or Caldera), but what the overall value of the package is. There is no doubt in my mind that the overall package from Red Hat for most people has a much higher value than what you get from SCO, and at a small fraction of the price.
The company I work for is using Java and making pretty strong commitments to it in the future. However, what we do is in-house development and very specialized, so you won't see it unless you work for us.
We haven't run into that many platform problems, although the range of platforms we need to support is fairly limited. We are also mainly using it for applications and servlets, not for applets.
As for speed, for most things it has been adequate, although I am currently running into a few problems on one project. I am not sure its the Java code or the database (most of the CPU usage seems to be in the database).
Try the keywords "Wim Van Eck Electronic Eavesdropping" in your favorite search engine (like www.google.com). That should give you the links you want.
Netcraft has information on how their numbers are generated on their pages if you are curious.
There are undoubtedly some Linux users doing virtual hosting, but my guess is that most of the really large virtual servers are being run on big iron like Solaris. Linux is obviously more popular with smaller hosting sites that likely have fewer domains per machine. I'd guess that the average number of IPs for Linux web servers is closer to 1 than 2.
Most of the large hosting sites that use an Apache derivative (like CnG and Rapidsite) have changed the identity string so that they are no longer counted on Netcraft as 'Apache', which means that the numbers are not likely to be off by as much as you seem to be implying.
There is really no way to know for sure how much that multiple IP's per machine might affect the netcraft numbers, but if it is more than a few percent when spread across four million Apache servers checked by Netcraft, I'd be surprised.
I don't think there is any significant amount of fudging going on. What it comes down to is that I doubt that a very large percentage of Linux users have even heard of the counter. A lot of people who have only heard of it may not know how to find it. May be too busy, lazy or apathetic to register. May be too paranoid to give out any of their personal information, etc...
I'd be surprised if more than 2 or 3% of Linux users have registered.
I think you are way off base.
I've been using Linux continually since the 0.99pl7 kernel was state of the art. It has been my primary computing platform for nearly as long (since 0.99pl14).
My guess is that there are more than 120,000 Linux boxes continuously on the net acting as web servers. NetCraft counts over four million web servers running Apache. Estimates I've seen say that at least 1/3 of the Apache based servers on the net are running Linux. Personally I believe that number to be conservative, but even if only 10% of the Apache servers on the net are Linux based, its over 400,000. And that isn't even considering that some Linux based web servers are running Stronghold, Zeus, Roxen, AOLServer, Netscape Fastrack, or something else.
My guess is that only about 1 in 5 Linux boxes are actually used to run a web server on the publicly accessable Internet. If that is true, then I'd say that 2 million would be a bottom number for the number of hard-core Linux users.
I don't think the 10-12 million numbers are at all out of line if they include casual, occasional and part-time users.
Slashdot has banner ads too. Shouldn't people get worked up about that too (just to be consistent, I mean).
People did, when Slashdot first started putting them on. I still see an occasional post mumbling about how wonderful junkbuster is at filtering out 'Rob's damned banner ads' or somesuch.
If he doesn't want to keep a Windows box (like he is short of desk space) I wonder what the likelyhood that any of these Windows-only tools will run under Wine?
Otherwise another option might be Bochs or VMware (which a number of other people have suggested).
I punched 'oracle' into the search box on freshmeat.net and got back a whole slew of hits, several of which sound like possibilities for what this guy is asking for, and probably a few others that might be other interesting tools for him to look at.
From what I've heard, AT&T (formerly TCI) started forcing non-business-rate cable modem customers towards NAT just recently, prior to that they were doing DHCP with real IPs for most users, and the IP's were fairly close to static. From what I've heard they are billing a move towards agressively changing IPs even for DHCP users as a 'security feature' as is how they are billing the move towards NAT. It is my understanding that the only way you will be able to get a true static IP from them in the future will be to pay for their business grade service.
As for DSL service, part of your quality and speed experience may depend on which ISP you use (since with DSL you have a choice and with cable you don't). US Worst seems to get the most dings in that area, and there are rumors that they may be moving towards forcing NAT on people also. I am using one of the other providers, and I have seen what I would consider good speed. I am paying for the 256kb connection and I generally see better than 400kb (50KB) download speed even from busy sites like netscape.com, and that is going through my underpowered (P75, 48M) squid proxy server and using Netscape as an FTP client (which isn't the most efficient). Upline speed is generally only slightly slower than the downline speed. I've also seen aggregate downline bandwidth usage of around 512kb when doing multiple transfers at once.
It will be interesting to see how well AT&T does in building up their infrastructure (like splitting cable modem network segments to reduce shared bandwidth congestion) as they add more customers. One other advantage to living on the poor side of town is that much fewer of my neighbors probably have cable modems than in the more afluent western suburbs.
As for distance, you must really be right on the edge of your service area. I am about 2.5 or so miles from the central office and while they wouldn't give me 512kb service here, I've had no troubles with 256kb service.
I ended up rewiring my house with all new Cat5 wiring, only to find out that the damned water company had some goofy automated meter reader sitting on the old wiring that was messing up the signal. Of course I also noticed an improvement in the sound quality in my voice line after rewiring, so I am not unhappy with the situation there.
One of my reasons for going with DSL is I was able to keep my existing (Linux friendly) ISP. I like the fact that myst ISP knows, and doesn't mind if I am running server processes. Another reason was because I was never happy with TCI as a cable vendor (I bought a DSS dish to get rid of them).
As for the cost issue, I expect that eventually US Worst will be forced reduce their pricing to be more competitive with AT&T. I don't really expect that to happen until both of them get the ability to wire every household in their market areas though.
In the long run you are right about needing fiber to the house, but I won't hold my breath waiting.
Rural areas generally don't have cable service because the density doesn't pay off well enough for cable companies to put in the wire. Current DSL hardware has a limit of approximately 3 miles from the central office, which also rules it out for most rural customers.
However, you are wrong about poor neighborhoods getting lousy access, at least where I live. I live on the 'wrong side of the tracks' -- the poor east side of the town (of approx 300,000 population) I live in. I had my choice of either DSL or cable modem (I chose DSL, because I run server processes and the cable company basically makes that impossible through use of NAT for anyone who isn't paying big bucks for their 'business grade' service). I also had no troubles using a 56k modem.
On the other hand, most of the people I work with live in the ritzy western suburbs, and all of the new development areas generally are on digital multiplexers, which means that DSL is just plain unavailable, and also means that they generally have trouble connecting at 56k (some report that they can't get higher than 26.6 even in a new house and with a good modem like a USR Courier). Many of those on the west side who are not on digital multiplexers are too far from their central office to get DSL. Being in an old neighborhood around here means it is much more likely you have a nice copper wire all the way back to the central office and more likely you are close enough to the central office to get DSL. Furthermore, large parts of the western suburbs don't even have digital cable service yet (which is a prerequisite for cable modem access). The reason for this is that the cable company is having trouble installing the infrastructure to get service out to all of the new development on the west side.
So the reality is that it is not necessarily true that poor neighborhoods will get lousy access.
Its not that big business probably wouldn't like to ignore the poorer areas... In this case the realities of infrastructure availability just happen to favor the poorer areas.
If you don't like consolidation, you can always help deconsolidate things by creating your own opensource discussion venue. You don't even have to do the coding, as there is software you can download.
Speaking as a programmer that has been doing a lot of Java development lately, this is very good news. The fact that 'official' Sun blessing has been given to a Java for Linux should help to make Linux more saleable to the PNB types as a Java development and/or deployment platform.
One difference is that I haven't seen any evidence that the other companies resorted to paying huge donations to politicians in order to get the DOJ to take action against Microsoft. I also haven't seen any evidence that the other companies used politicians that they had funded to try to influence the budgets of agencies that were doing things that would influence their businesses.
There is a difference here in which companies are doing lobbying in a way that is ethical, and what Microsoft is doing. I am continually surprised by the lengths that Microsoft apologists will go to bend over far enough to make it look like what Microsoft is doing is no different than what other companies do. Even though it is sometimes true that individual actions by Microsoft may not be that much further than what other companies have done, I can't think of any company who so consistantly and determinedly pushes the boundaries of ethical behavior in so many ways. Even the IBM of the 70's and 80's who also found itself involved with anti-trust proceedings in general seemed to conduct themselves in a less ethically challenged way than Microsoft does. IBM has gone a long way towards cleaning up their kitchen, and lets hope that Microsoft can and will follow their example and work towards becoming a good, clean corporate citizen.
I have no less than four different models of SCSI CD-ROM drive (Toshiba, Sony & two varieties of Panasonic), and no less than six different SCSI cards (Adaptec 1540B (ISA), Adaptec 1540CF (ISA), Adaptec 2840A (VLB), Future Domain 950 (8 bit ISA), Future Domain 1860 (ISA) and NCR/Symbios Logic 53C810A (PCI). I have never had any troubles with Linux recognizing CD-ROM drives on any Linux kernel, and I've been using Linux since 0.99pl7.
If you work in the financial services industry like I do. It has been clear to me for a long time that Microsoft wants to skim the cream off of all the financial services industry. They want to cut into the business of MasterCard, Visa, etc. They want to cut into the general banking, mortgage, etc. business. In the future most financial transactions will be done at least partially online, and if we aren't careful, Microsoft will be getting a piece of every transaction.
What irks me is that management just doesn't see Microsoft as a competitor. We shouldn't be buying any of our competitor's products, because we are funding Microsoft to move into our own markets.
I'm afraid they won't see it until it is too late.
Microsoft talked tough to competitors, but generally backed down when their bluff was called. That, folks, is what is known as ordinary business practices.
That is called bully tactics at best, and if its ordinary business, then business should be ashamed of itself. And even if it is common, it doesn't mean that the industry shouldn't fight against unethical and/or illegal practices when they happen.
For example, Microsoft threatened to withold Windows 95 from IBM. IBM didn't budge from their position. Microsoft backed down.
IBM is one of the few companies that is big enough and powerful enough that they can play hardball with Microsoft. IBM also has a track record of playing dirty (although they seem to have significantly cleaned up their act in the past few years), which they also have spent significant time in court with the government over.
In any case, Microsoft may have eventually backed down, but they did manage to stick IBM with more expensive licensing than some of the other competitors were paying, and they also delayed giving IBM access to Windows 95 long enough that it was a competitive disadvantage for IBM.
One minor correction... the last three paragraphs should not be italicized. I must have missed a closing tag. Sorry for any confusion this might cause...