Depends on what you want I suppose. My complaints against WinCE is that it basically requires a very fast processor and a lot of memory for a handheld because the environment is pretty fat, unlike a Palm. It also basically demands a color display because the user interface kinda stinks in monochrome, unlike a Palm. Those two things mean that WinCE devices tend to cost several times what a Palm of similar capabilities can, and also they have a lot shorter battery life, which is a pain in the butt. Most of the more powerful WinCE devices are also bigger and heavier than Palms are. And in my opinion, the Palm user interface is still better designed for a handheld than WinCE, probably because it really was designed from scratch for that sort of device and not carrying a lot of baggage from a desktop ancestor/sibling. There may be certain high end applications for which a WinCE device can do more than a Palm, but once you start getting into that area, you have to start looking at the smaller x86 notebooks instead of a WinCE device...
So for my money, PalmOS is my choice over WinCE. Maybe a Linux based handheld in the future though, just because it would be cooler than hell and be more like my desktop...:-)
Re:Geez, Ford couldn't buy publicity like that.
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I guess you don't understand what a smiley:-) is... It was a joke son. A joke. I really don't care who Ford uses to create their web site.
I can type f*** if I want to. You are free to do whatever you want -- leave me alone. And I didn't 'point to' goatse.cx, I merely mentioned it. If someone wants to look there, they certainly can, but if they go to the trouble of cutting and pasting that into their location box, then it sure isn't my problem if they are offended.
The true idiot is the one that purports to tell me what I can say and what I can't, and what I'm scared of or not. So you can go fornicate yourself for all I care. I think it may be truly more offensive to try to violate my freedom of speech by telling me I can't not say a word than to say I can't say that word.
I think I will write f*** a few more times just to p*** you off.
Re:Geez, Ford couldn't buy publicity like that.
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NT, W2k, what's the difference...:-)
Its kinda like "Coca Cola" vs. "New Coke" vs. "Coca Cola Classic"...
Re:Geez, Ford couldn't buy publicity like that.
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Yea, yea... I know that... But would any reasonable person actually believe that Ford was behind something like this? And wouldn't a large portion of Ford's employees feel the sentiment of f***ing their biggest competitor? Even the management?
Of course, the whole thing might have been funnier if the f***GM domain had been pointed to that horribly offensive little image at goatse.cx or something...:-)
I mean come on, they were even using IBMs DB2 database, are you telling me that IBM doesn't know how to use their database in a cluster of machines but SGI (RIP) does?
SGI was just the first to submit a Linux based TPC entry. SGI started working seriously with Linux before IBM had really taken that up too. It will be interesting to see if IBM follows SGI's lead and submits a similarly configured Netfinity (x Series) machine with DB2 EEE. I'd for one love to see that.
Is dynix more important to them than Linux, it looks like it to me.
More important to IBM or more established at IBM? Linux doesn't (yet) run on the NUMA/Q hardware that DYNIX/ptx does. However, look at what IBM is doing with AIX 5L. They are starting to make it more and more like Linux, and make Linux more and more like AIX by releasing key parts of AIX technology as open source for Linux. IBM has previously stated their intention not only to get Linux running on all their hardware platforms including the NUMA/Q machines, but also to bring the technology for DYNIX/ptx to Linux, and one would assume also add "Linux Affinity" to DYNIX/ptx.
Well, the 4 machines SGI used cost around US$450,000. It is certainly reasonable to ask if a benchmark performed on that sort of hardware has any relevance to 99% of users. And they used RedHat 6.2 so it's hardly cutting-edge Linux technology.
Just for giggles I priced four Penguin Magnus 4500's (as closely configured as I could to the SGI boxes). They were just over 1/4 the price of SGI's hardware.
It is also worth noting that the DB2 EEE licenses were over 1/3 the total price.
I see it as interesting because previously no vendor had used Linux for a TPC benchmark (indeed I was under the impression that the TPC wouldn't allow it).
TPC doesn't disallow anyone from running TPC benchmarks on Linux. They disallow anyone from publishing TPC benchmarks that isn't a member of TPC and that aren't officially submitted to TPC. Both membership in TPC and submitting results cost money. Up until now a vendor hasn't been willing to pony up to submit TPC numbers under Linux. That is apparently changing.
I'd really love to see IBM and/or Compaq submit DB2 EEE results on a cluster of four quad Xeon Netfinity or Proliant servers... I think that IBM or Compaq could offer a significantly better $/QphH value than SGI does, because SGI's hardware is expensive.
Then why is the Linux benchmark for price/performance over twice that of SQL Server 2000 smart guy? Think before you post.
Differences in pricing of the database, for one. IBM DB2 EEE prices per CPU ($22,500), MS SQL Server 2000 prices per user. $360,000 of the SGI price is DB2 EEE license. The price for a limited number of users of MS SQL Server 2000 is cheaper, but not realistic for a production environment for a machine this big which will have lots of users.
Secondly, SGI's hardware is about twice as expensive as similarly configured hardware from, say, Penguin Computing, and also significantly more expensive than similar Netfinity or Proliant boxes. SGI also greatly overspec'd the amount of storage and other things on their servers, which gave themselves a little disadvantage on the pricing that they probably didn't need to.
Um, did you notice that the linux benchmark was $347/QphH while the next one on the list (W2K) is $161/QphH. Which one is more expen$ive?
Part of that is the fact that $360,000 of the price is just the licenses for DB2 EEE for 16 processors ($22,500 per CPU). Also none of the other entires in that category look like they are clusters (so no redundancy) which gives them a bit of a price advantage over the SGI config which has to include the hardware for shared disk. Of course that means that if you wanted to scale up any of those others to a cluster later, you'd have to pay the price to retrofit that later rather than just rolling in more boxes and redistributing the data as with the SGI/DB2 entry.
Secondly, SGI charges a real premium for their hardware. I know they build good stuff, but really, can their box be that much better than say a Netfinity or a Proliant which also has 4 700MHz 2M Cache Xeons in it? Or for that matter that much better than say a Penguin Magnus 4500 (same CPUs)? I priced things out with the Penguin boxes and the total price including the DB2 EEE licenses (which would be the same), and it came up to just over 1/2 the SGI price... Which would give a $/QphH value well into the ballpark of the others. I don't have a good way online to get comparative pricing for IBM and Compaq hardware, but I'd suspect that it is also cheaper than SGI's, and thus would lend a better ratio as well.
I disagree. Being a monopoly is I believe, and ought to be, having control over an industry. It should not be related to market share. But in agreement, it has nothing to do with your competitors.
Having an opressively large market share does give you control over that market by definition. If you control 90% of the market, it is very difficult for anyone to break in. It leaves very little revenue for anyone else, which is probably why Linux is about the only thing that has been making any headway against Microsoft.
I strongly disagree. Microsoft cannot control any industry, despite its best efforts.
If Microsoft doesn't control their core markets, then I think that nobody has ever controlled a market and there is no such thing as a monopoly.
They tried to kill Netscape Navigator, and what happened?
Netscape had to be bought up by AOL and Sun in order to survive? Internet Exploder controls 75% of the browser market? Probably more than that on Windows, as most of the remaining Netscape users are us stubborn Linux (or other *nix) or Mac users...
NS is still in heavy use,
If only that was true.
Mozilla was created (soon to be the dominant browser)
I hope you are right about that, but as long as Microsoft can force feed Windows onto 90% of the world's desktops, and as long as they can force feed IE onto all of those desktops, then Mozilla will have a huge uphill battle, even if it beats IE in every technical area.
and Konqueror has gained ground.
I like Konqueror, but realistically, it is only for KDE users, and they aren't even a dominant fraction of the *nix user base.
Beyond that, their properitary extensions to HTML were summarily rejected by the W3C and are basically depreciated in the real world.
Whether that is true or not, and I don't think it is as true as you'd have us believe, it doesn't mean that Microsoft hasn't been very effective at using their OS monopoly to extend into the area of browsers.
Other markets, for example, the Big One (Desktop OS's). How have they affected/controlled the market?
In the way that matters at the bottom line. They ship on better than 90% of the machines.
Can you buy desktop OEM machines with more or less OS choice than ten years ago? More.
Wrong. 10 years ago you could choose things like Amiga that aren't even around anymore. 15 years ago there were dozens of alternative architectures to choose from.
They have failed to eliminate choice, and force Windows on consumers. Can OEMs choose new/alternate OS's? Yes.
Highly misleading. It is only due to governmental anti-trust actions that this is true. Prior to that, Microsoft had forced all the major PC vendors into per-processor licensing or exclusive pre-load agreements that effectively excluded them from shipping any machine with an alternative OS or even without an OS at all. Even now, it is virtually impossible to buy a machine retail without Windows, and more difficult to buy a machine by mail without Windows than it should be if Microsoft wasn't able to twist vendors arms.
I always think that if you don't like a company, or its New Speak, you shouldn't use their software.
I go out of my way to avoid Microsoft products.
Case Example: I hate Larry Elison - I think he's a pompous jack ass.
The reason I don't like Microsoft is not because I think that Bill Gates and Steve Balmer are jerks, although I think that is true... While Larry certainly wouldn't be my poster boy for niceness, Oracle as a company plays a lot nicer with the industry than Microsoft does...
Even though Oracle controls a huge majority of the database market I don't use their software.
I have used Oracle's database, and it is a good product, although it looks like we are going with a competing product for the project I am working on right now.
I use alternatives. Even though there are fewer db makers, and even though they are very popular, they aren't a monopoly.
Oracle doesn't come anywhere near 90% of the database market, and they have a lot more serious competition than Microsoft faces in the OS or office suite markets. There is Microsoft MS-SQL Server, IBM's DB2, Sybase, etc. Oracle would also be a lot more dangerous if they controlled the OS platform and development tools markets as well as the database server markets, so it is not really a fair comparison to pit Oracle against Microsoft.
They can't control an industry (change prices arbitrarily across multiple vendors, products).
Microsoft does all that, and Oracle comes pretty close.
That remains to be seen, but remember... if the original premise that MS is a monopoly is false, then everything they did was 100% legal.
Actually, they've done a lot of thing that are certainly unethical and look to be illegal even for a non-monopoly...
It all hinges on the monopoly finding.
One of the problems with the DOJ-vs-MS trial was that the DOJ did a very poor job of pushing forward all of the other dirt on MS. They kept the focus too narrow.
Bill Gates may be a bad man, MS may be a bad company who makes bad expensive closed software, BUT it still doesn't make them a monopoly in Desktop OS's
No, but pretty much by definition, 90% market share does.
How long do you think the government would let GM have a 90% share of the auto market? How long do you think they'd get away with telling dealers that they couldn't sell any competing brands? How long do you think they'd let GM tell dealers they couldn't add any customizations to their cars? Microsoft basically has done all that and worse... I think they get away with it only because the government doesn't understand the computer industry.
If you did that, you deserve what you get. I think for people to which $10k is a lot, that they'd be careful enough. Its an awful lot of bills to make $10k with $100 bills.
The government isn't that concerned about single $10k bills floating around, but the briefcases full of them going through airports, etc. The government is paranoid about money laundering and they think that making cash more of a pain to handle they will slow that down.
Kind of like Microsoft and Linux. MS is a monopoly, until you put Linux in the picture.
Microsoft still holds monopoly positions, even with Linux in the picture. Having a monopoly doesn't mean not having any competitors at all. It means having an overwhelming market share. Microsoft has over 90% of both the desktop OS market and the office suite market. Even though there are competitors to them in both areas, they still have monopoly powers and use them in ways that are in my opinion both unethical and illegal.
Microsoft would like to redefine the word "Monopoly" in such a way as to make it such a narrow term that it doesn't apply to them, but we shouldn't let them do it. We also shouldn't let them get away with redefining "innovation" and other words the way that they do.
What it comes down to with CDDB vs freedb is that Gracenote is trying to use patent law as a way to try to get a legal monopoly and actually exclude anyone else from being able to compete with them at all. This is actually worse in some ways than what Microsoft usually does. Let's hope that Microsoft doesn't add this dirty trick to their playbook... they already have just about every other one in there...:-(
So wouldn't CDDB be confinded to the same laws of using their monopoly to snuff the competition?
You'd certainly hope that was true... But it is starting to look like Microsoft is going to get off with little more than a slap on the wrist... not because they didn't honestly lose their case, but just because the judge said too much.
I think that if Microsoft can get away with blatant violations of anti-trust law as they aparently are going to, then I am afraid it will be like declaring it open season for every other company to start playing dirty all the time. That is a bad thing for everyone.
Actually, Solaris has an x86 version, as do all of the BSD variants (FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD and BSDi). QNX is also x86, and for that matter so is BeOS, which wasn't on the original list.
I'm all for encouraging teamwork while at the same time discouraging verbatim copying... up to a point. In the real world you want to borrow as much as you can without limiting yourself to that. So it is a matter of how much you can lift and still add something. So verbatim copying isn't per-se bad... but you'd better be able to add something beyond that. That is where value is added. Sometimes the "good enough" is the enemy of the great. But sometimes the "great" is the enemy of the good enough. The hard part is deciding on what is important. The important is worth putting the effort for the great on, the unimportant, it is a waste to do more than the good enough for. There are only so many hours in the day, and deciding what you put forth your effort on is often the most important thing in the real world.
While there is a point where plagiarism can be a bad thing, unfortunately all too often the academic world teaches people that teamwork is cheating, and that is not always a good thing. One of the biggest problems (second in my opinion only to the fact that a large percentage of people in the computer business are functionally near illiterate) is that too many people don't work well in teams.
Many Hackers have a bent towards solitary work, and often reinvent the wheel more than they need to in the first place. We don't need the educational system encouraging this bad behavior.
The world of the Internet and open source development is finally providing a way that hackers from around the world can share their work and learn teamwork. This is a good thing.
While I don't know that the professor that was the subject of this article is really a good example of what I'm talking about, his actions are sure to spur on others to crack the whip and take things too far.
Unions exist to get fair treatment for all laborers.
Unions seem to think that means that 'fair' means the same treatment for everyone, regardless of skill. Most of the time they only seem to think that workers should be paid according to seniority. Unions seem to defend those that are lazy and punish or try to hold back those that work harder or smarter.
I'm not interested in being part of that. I'm interested in pay based on merit, and that isn't necessarily always going to be viewed as 'fair' by everyone. I don't necessarily want to trade away my ability to bargain for myself for the tyranny of the majority.
I personally think that the reason it is so hard for unions to organize skilled technical workers is because we feel closer to management than blue-collar workers. Many of us aspire to, or know that our future will eventually make us more on the management side than we are now. Many of us hold an equity stake in the companies we work for (through options, 401K or company stock purchase plans), so we view our companies differently than does the auto worker, steel worker, rubber worker, etc. that is the typical union member. Many IT workers have an entreprenurial (sp?) spirit, and I don't think that is very compatible with unionism.
I guess part of the problem is that when I leave the company, they are going to have a hard time finding someone who can administer the Linux systems I have implemeneted, and therefor would rather stick with Microsoft "soultions".
I think the word in quotes should be "problems"...:-) Anyway, it basically is not true in most places that it is harder to find a qualified *nix administrator than a qualified Windows administrator. Sure, you can hire some joker who went to some diploma mill school and has a shiny new MCSE certificate really easy, but that doesn't mean much in the real world. For that matter, it isn't that hard to find a junior level *nix adminstrator these days, as a lot of people are using it at home these days.
Anyone out there from the 515 area code? I noticed that most of the 515 numbers are only for 90's BBS's. I was wondering if anyone had BBS lists from the mid 80's for 515? I probably do buried somewhere, but they are probably all on Apple II media, and I'd have to dig a machine out of storage to read them!:-)
Here is why Microsoft and/or Mundie won't sue Linus...
If they did, it would be a huge PR disaster for them.
For one, it would be publically acknowledging that such a simple statement, flippant though it might be, could piss them off. It certainly wouldn't make them look like the kind of mature and rational company they want the heads of large businesses to think they are.
Secondly, it would give Linus and Linux a huge amount of free publicity, and while their 'declaration of war' already is doing that, an actual lawsuit in a court of law is more difficult to control than the court of public opinion. Microsoft can afford to spend billions on astroturf campaigns and use advertising dollars to strongarm the media, but judges have this damned independant streak that make them unpredictable. Microsoft has maybe learned a little about that recently, and I think they might not want to go there if they don't have to.
Thirdly, if Microsoft thinks they are too often the target of the ill will of the technical community now, attacking a well respected figure like Linus would certainly worsen that situation.
But when the majority didn't voted for you (check the number of vote) you have to be carefull.
Interestingly enough the majority didn't vote for Bill Clinton either. Neither in 1992 nor 1996. Due to H. Ross Perot acting as spoiler and splitting the right and moderate vote, Clinton managed to be elected with no more than 42% of the popular vote or so compared to 38 or 39% for George Bush Sr. and Bob Dole. Had Perot not run in either case it is highly unlikely Clinton would have won given that Perot took a lot more votes away from the Republican candidate than from Clinton.
To be fair, it was Ralph Nader who cost Al Gore the election, acting as spoiler, he got more than the narrow margin of victory's worth of votes in Florida, and it is likely Gore would have won Florida had Nader not been running.
I believe that G.W. Bush actually got a bigger percentage of the popular vote than Bill Clinton did in either '92 or '96, despite narrowly losing the popular vote (Perot got a lot more votes than Nader did). Of course, as we all know, it is the Electoral College that matters...
Uh, yea, like it is real easy for us to tell when you are both anonymous cowards.
- and i wasn't trolling.
Whatever.
lotus 1-2-3 is no competition for even gnumeric, and if your product can't stand up to a half-ass beta written by a bunch of whiskey addicted 17 year olds, it doesn't belong on the market.
I say let the market decide. And can you bother to give me more details on how 1-2-3 is inferior to Gnumeric, or am I just supposed to take your word for it. Not to belittle you, but I have no idea who the heck you are, so I can only judge your arguments by their merit or lack thereof. And your across the board assault on the character of the Gnome developers does little to lend credence to your arguments.
i don't want them to release it because i don't want some sentimental idiot like yourself getting all misty eyed over his supposed 1-2-3 l33t-4ss scripting skillz0rz and asking me to install and maintain it on a perfectly-well running linux network.
Sheesh. Who urinated in your dry breakfast cerial. Like installing a little software is such a big freaking deal for someone who obviously thinks they are cthulu's gift to sysadmins. And I've got enough experience with Linux not to believe that merely adding a piece of commercial software is going to suddently make it not 'well running'. And I'm not very sentimental about Lotus, I never really used their products that heavily.
if they did release it, it'd be closed-source anyways and therefor worse than useless.
Ah... the "everything must be free" argument. Well, I would like that in a perfect world, but in reality, life isn't so simple, and sometimes you have to deal with commercial products.
Hey... I use vi all the time. Although I generally use Perl instead of awk these days.
That being said, I wasn't implying that evolution in software was necessarily a bad thing, rather that it isn't mandatory for a port of a peice of software to be a good thing. If a package was good at one time, it is probably still useful now, and having it available is better than not.
I'd also like to think that as software evolves, it should get better, and I am not sure that always happens. Sometimes I think that when things are just added and added and added, that a product can become worse rather than better.
Does it really need to? I dunno about anyone else, but from what I see out there in the business world, most of the users barely know how to use a tiny fraction of the software they have. Most of the features in the popular software is dead weight for most people, most of the time. When it comes right down to it in general office productivity software, I'm not completely convinced that there really has been a lot of improvement in the overall capabilities of software in the past several years, and this is true of most of the big commercial vendors, not just Microsoft. Almost all of the new features I see touted in newer versions of office suites seem like they are mostly fluff to me.
Well, at least I know what kind of "troll" you are now...:-)
That being said, if you really feel that way then why be worried if IBM was to enter the market with Lotus SmartSuite? I don't see more options and more competition as a bad thing.
I haven't looked at Abiword recently, but I have to say I've been pretty favorably impressed with Gnumeric the last couple of times I've used it (mainly to open.xls files people have sent me and to edit and print some expense reimbursement forms).
Slashdot Mirror
Depends on what you want I suppose. My complaints against WinCE is that it basically requires a very fast processor and a lot of memory for a handheld because the environment is pretty fat, unlike a Palm. It also basically demands a color display because the user interface kinda stinks in monochrome, unlike a Palm. Those two things mean that WinCE devices tend to cost several times what a Palm of similar capabilities can, and also they have a lot shorter battery life, which is a pain in the butt. Most of the more powerful WinCE devices are also bigger and heavier than Palms are. And in my opinion, the Palm user interface is still better designed for a handheld than WinCE, probably because it really was designed from scratch for that sort of device and not carrying a lot of baggage from a desktop ancestor/sibling. There may be certain high end applications for which a WinCE device can do more than a Palm, but once you start getting into that area, you have to start looking at the smaller x86 notebooks instead of a WinCE device...
:-)
So for my money, PalmOS is my choice over WinCE. Maybe a Linux based handheld in the future though, just because it would be cooler than hell and be more like my desktop...
I guess you don't understand what a smiley :-) is... It was a joke son. A joke. I really don't care who Ford uses to create their web site.
I can type f*** if I want to. You are free to do whatever you want -- leave me alone. And I didn't 'point to' goatse.cx, I merely mentioned it. If someone wants to look there, they certainly can, but if they go to the trouble of cutting and pasting that into their location box, then it sure isn't my problem if they are offended.
The true idiot is the one that purports to tell me what I can say and what I can't, and what I'm scared of or not. So you can go fornicate yourself for all I care. I think it may be truly more offensive to try to violate my freedom of speech by telling me I can't not say a word than to say I can't say that word.
I think I will write f*** a few more times just to p*** you off.
NT, W2k, what's the difference... :-)
Its kinda like "Coca Cola" vs. "New Coke" vs. "Coca Cola Classic"...
Yea, yea... I know that... But would any reasonable person actually believe that Ford was behind something like this? And wouldn't a large portion of Ford's employees feel the sentiment of f***ing their biggest competitor? Even the management?
:-)
Of course, the whole thing might have been funnier if the f***GM domain had been pointed to that horribly offensive little image at goatse.cx or something...
I mean come on, they were even using IBMs DB2 database, are you telling me that IBM doesn't know how to use their database in a cluster of machines but SGI (RIP) does?
SGI was just the first to submit a Linux based TPC entry. SGI started working seriously with Linux before IBM had really taken that up too. It will be interesting to see if IBM follows SGI's lead and submits a similarly configured Netfinity (x Series) machine with DB2 EEE. I'd for one love to see that.
Is dynix more important to them than Linux, it looks like it to me.
More important to IBM or more established at IBM? Linux doesn't (yet) run on the NUMA/Q hardware that DYNIX/ptx does. However, look at what IBM is doing with AIX 5L. They are starting to make it more and more like Linux, and make Linux more and more like AIX by releasing key parts of AIX technology as open source for Linux. IBM has previously stated their intention not only to get Linux running on all their hardware platforms including the NUMA/Q machines, but also to bring the technology for DYNIX/ptx to Linux, and one would assume also add "Linux Affinity" to DYNIX/ptx.
Well, the 4 machines SGI used cost around US$450,000. It is certainly reasonable to ask if a benchmark performed on that sort of hardware has any relevance to 99% of users. And they used RedHat 6.2 so it's hardly cutting-edge Linux technology.
Just for giggles I priced four Penguin Magnus 4500's (as closely configured as I could to the SGI boxes). They were just over 1/4 the price of SGI's hardware.
It is also worth noting that the DB2 EEE licenses were over 1/3 the total price.
I see it as interesting because previously no vendor had used Linux for a TPC benchmark (indeed I was under the impression that the TPC wouldn't allow it).
TPC doesn't disallow anyone from running TPC benchmarks on Linux. They disallow anyone from publishing TPC benchmarks that isn't a member of TPC and that aren't officially submitted to TPC. Both membership in TPC and submitting results cost money. Up until now a vendor hasn't been willing to pony up to submit TPC numbers under Linux. That is apparently changing.
I'd really love to see IBM and/or Compaq submit DB2 EEE results on a cluster of four quad Xeon Netfinity or Proliant servers... I think that IBM or Compaq could offer a significantly better $/QphH value than SGI does, because SGI's hardware is expensive.
Then why is the Linux benchmark for price/performance over twice that of SQL Server 2000 smart guy? Think before you post.
Differences in pricing of the database, for one. IBM DB2 EEE prices per CPU ($22,500), MS SQL Server 2000 prices per user. $360,000 of the SGI price is DB2 EEE license. The price for a limited number of users of MS SQL Server 2000 is cheaper, but not realistic for a production environment for a machine this big which will have lots of users.
Secondly, SGI's hardware is about twice as expensive as similarly configured hardware from, say, Penguin Computing, and also significantly more expensive than similar Netfinity or Proliant boxes. SGI also greatly overspec'd the amount of storage and other things on their servers, which gave themselves a little disadvantage on the pricing that they probably didn't need to.
Um, did you notice that the linux benchmark was $347/QphH while the next one on the list (W2K) is $161/QphH. Which one is more expen$ive?
Part of that is the fact that $360,000 of the price is just the licenses for DB2 EEE for 16 processors ($22,500 per CPU). Also none of the other entires in that category look like they are clusters (so no redundancy) which gives them a bit of a price advantage over the SGI config which has to include the hardware for shared disk. Of course that means that if you wanted to scale up any of those others to a cluster later, you'd have to pay the price to retrofit that later rather than just rolling in more boxes and redistributing the data as with the SGI/DB2 entry.
Secondly, SGI charges a real premium for their hardware. I know they build good stuff, but really, can their box be that much better than say a Netfinity or a Proliant which also has 4 700MHz 2M Cache Xeons in it? Or for that matter that much better than say a Penguin Magnus 4500 (same CPUs)? I priced things out with the Penguin boxes and the total price including the DB2 EEE licenses (which would be the same), and it came up to just over 1/2 the SGI price... Which would give a $/QphH value well into the ballpark of the others. I don't have a good way online to get comparative pricing for IBM and Compaq hardware, but I'd suspect that it is also cheaper than SGI's, and thus would lend a better ratio as well.
Crap. Missed a damned closing italic tag... :-(
I disagree. Being a monopoly is I believe, and ought to be, having control over an industry. It should not be related to market share. But in agreement, it has nothing to do with your competitors.
Having an opressively large market share does give you control over that market by definition. If you control 90% of the market, it is very difficult for anyone to break in. It leaves very little revenue for anyone else, which is probably why Linux is about the only thing that has been making any headway against Microsoft.
I strongly disagree. Microsoft cannot control any industry, despite its best efforts.
If Microsoft doesn't control their core markets, then I think that nobody has ever controlled a market and there is no such thing as a monopoly.
They tried to kill Netscape Navigator, and what happened?
Netscape had to be bought up by AOL and Sun in order to survive? Internet Exploder controls 75% of the browser market? Probably more than that on Windows, as most of the remaining Netscape users are us stubborn Linux (or other *nix) or Mac users...
NS is still in heavy use,
If only that was true.
Mozilla was created (soon to be the dominant browser)
I hope you are right about that, but as long as Microsoft can force feed Windows onto 90% of the world's desktops, and as long as they can force feed IE onto all of those desktops, then Mozilla will have a huge uphill battle, even if it beats IE in every technical area.
and Konqueror has gained ground.
I like Konqueror, but realistically, it is only for KDE users, and they aren't even a dominant fraction of the *nix user base.
Beyond that, their properitary extensions to HTML were summarily rejected by the W3C and are basically depreciated in the real world.
Whether that is true or not, and I don't think it is as true as you'd have us believe, it doesn't mean that Microsoft hasn't been very effective at using their OS monopoly to extend into the area of browsers.
Other markets, for example, the Big One (Desktop OS's). How have they affected/controlled the market?
In the way that matters at the bottom line. They ship on better than 90% of the machines.
Can you buy desktop OEM machines with more or less OS choice than ten years ago? More.
Wrong. 10 years ago you could choose things like Amiga that aren't even around anymore. 15 years ago there were dozens of alternative architectures to choose from.
They have failed to eliminate choice, and force Windows on consumers. Can OEMs choose new/alternate OS's? Yes.
Highly misleading. It is only due to governmental anti-trust actions that this is true. Prior to that, Microsoft had forced all the major PC vendors into per-processor licensing or exclusive pre-load agreements that effectively excluded them from shipping any machine with an alternative OS or even without an OS at all. Even now, it is virtually impossible to buy a machine retail without Windows, and more difficult to buy a machine by mail without Windows than it should be if Microsoft wasn't able to twist vendors arms.
I always think that if you don't like a company, or its New Speak, you shouldn't use their software.
I go out of my way to avoid Microsoft products.
Case Example: I hate Larry Elison - I think he's a pompous jack ass.
The reason I don't like Microsoft is not because I think that Bill Gates and Steve Balmer are jerks, although I think that is true... While Larry certainly wouldn't be my poster boy for niceness, Oracle as a company plays a lot nicer with the industry than Microsoft does...
Even though Oracle controls a huge majority of the database market I don't use their software.
I have used Oracle's database, and it is a good product, although it looks like we are going with a competing product for the project I am working on right now.
I use alternatives. Even though there are fewer db makers, and even though they are very popular, they aren't a monopoly.
Oracle doesn't come anywhere near 90% of the database market, and they have a lot more serious competition than Microsoft faces in the OS or office suite markets. There is Microsoft MS-SQL Server, IBM's DB2, Sybase, etc. Oracle would also be a lot more dangerous if they controlled the OS platform and development tools markets as well as the database server markets, so it is not really a fair comparison to pit Oracle against Microsoft.
They can't control an industry (change prices arbitrarily across multiple vendors, products).
Microsoft does all that, and Oracle comes pretty close.
That remains to be seen, but remember... if the original premise that MS is a monopoly is false, then everything they did was 100% legal.
Actually, they've done a lot of thing that are certainly unethical and look to be illegal even for a non-monopoly...
It all hinges on the monopoly finding.
One of the problems with the DOJ-vs-MS trial was that the DOJ did a very poor job of pushing forward all of the other dirt on MS. They kept the focus too narrow.
Bill Gates may be a bad man, MS may be a bad company who makes bad expensive closed software, BUT it still doesn't make them a monopoly in Desktop OS's
No, but pretty much by definition, 90% market share does.
How long do you think the government would let GM have a 90% share of the auto market? How long do you think they'd get away with telling dealers that they couldn't sell any competing brands? How long do you think they'd let GM tell dealers they couldn't add any customizations to their cars? Microsoft basically has done all that and worse... I think they get away with it only because the government doesn't understand the computer industry.
If you did that, you deserve what you get. I think for people to which $10k is a lot, that they'd be careful enough. Its an awful lot of bills to make $10k with $100 bills.
The government isn't that concerned about single $10k bills floating around, but the briefcases full of them going through airports, etc. The government is paranoid about money laundering and they think that making cash more of a pain to handle they will slow that down.
Kind of like Microsoft and Linux. MS is a monopoly, until you put Linux in the picture.
:-(
Microsoft still holds monopoly positions, even with Linux in the picture. Having a monopoly doesn't mean not having any competitors at all. It means having an overwhelming market share. Microsoft has over 90% of both the desktop OS market and the office suite market. Even though there are competitors to them in both areas, they still have monopoly powers and use them in ways that are in my opinion both unethical and illegal.
Microsoft would like to redefine the word "Monopoly" in such a way as to make it such a narrow term that it doesn't apply to them, but we shouldn't let them do it. We also shouldn't let them get away with redefining "innovation" and other words the way that they do.
What it comes down to with CDDB vs freedb is that Gracenote is trying to use patent law as a way to try to get a legal monopoly and actually exclude anyone else from being able to compete with them at all. This is actually worse in some ways than what Microsoft usually does. Let's hope that Microsoft doesn't add this dirty trick to their playbook... they already have just about every other one in there...
So wouldn't CDDB be confinded to the same laws of using their monopoly to snuff the competition?
You'd certainly hope that was true... But it is starting to look like Microsoft is going to get off with little more than a slap on the wrist... not because they didn't honestly lose their case, but just because the judge said too much.
I think that if Microsoft can get away with blatant violations of anti-trust law as they aparently are going to, then I am afraid it will be like declaring it open season for every other company to start playing dirty all the time. That is a bad thing for everyone.
Actually, Solaris has an x86 version, as do all of the BSD variants (FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD and BSDi). QNX is also x86, and for that matter so is BeOS, which wasn't on the original list.
I'm all for encouraging teamwork while at the same time discouraging verbatim copying... up to a point. In the real world you want to borrow as much as you can without limiting yourself to that. So it is a matter of how much you can lift and still add something. So verbatim copying isn't per-se bad... but you'd better be able to add something beyond that. That is where value is added. Sometimes the "good enough" is the enemy of the great. But sometimes the "great" is the enemy of the good enough. The hard part is deciding on what is important. The important is worth putting the effort for the great on, the unimportant, it is a waste to do more than the good enough for. There are only so many hours in the day, and deciding what you put forth your effort on is often the most important thing in the real world.
While there is a point where plagiarism can be a bad thing, unfortunately all too often the academic world teaches people that teamwork is cheating, and that is not always a good thing. One of the biggest problems (second in my opinion only to the fact that a large percentage of people in the computer business are functionally near illiterate) is that too many people don't work well in teams.
Many Hackers have a bent towards solitary work, and often reinvent the wheel more than they need to in the first place. We don't need the educational system encouraging this bad behavior.
The world of the Internet and open source development is finally providing a way that hackers from around the world can share their work and learn teamwork. This is a good thing.
While I don't know that the professor that was the subject of this article is really a good example of what I'm talking about, his actions are sure to spur on others to crack the whip and take things too far.
Unions exist to get fair treatment for all laborers.
Unions seem to think that means that 'fair' means the same treatment for everyone, regardless of skill. Most of the time they only seem to think that workers should be paid according to seniority. Unions seem to defend those that are lazy and punish or try to hold back those that work harder or smarter.
I'm not interested in being part of that. I'm interested in pay based on merit, and that isn't necessarily always going to be viewed as 'fair' by everyone. I don't necessarily want to trade away my ability to bargain for myself for the tyranny of the majority.
I personally think that the reason it is so hard for unions to organize skilled technical workers is because we feel closer to management than blue-collar workers. Many of us aspire to, or know that our future will eventually make us more on the management side than we are now. Many of us hold an equity stake in the companies we work for (through options, 401K or company stock purchase plans), so we view our companies differently than does the auto worker, steel worker, rubber worker, etc. that is the typical union member. Many IT workers have an entreprenurial (sp?) spirit, and I don't think that is very compatible with unionism.
I guess part of the problem is that when I leave the company, they are going to have a hard time finding someone who can administer the Linux systems I have implemeneted, and therefor would rather stick with Microsoft "soultions".
:-) Anyway, it basically is not true in most places that it is harder to find a qualified *nix administrator than a qualified Windows administrator. Sure, you can hire some joker who went to some diploma mill school and has a shiny new MCSE certificate really easy, but that doesn't mean much in the real world. For that matter, it isn't that hard to find a junior level *nix adminstrator these days, as a lot of people are using it at home these days.
I think the word in quotes should be "problems"...
Anyone out there from the 515 area code? I noticed that most of the 515 numbers are only for 90's BBS's. I was wondering if anyone had BBS lists from the mid 80's for 515? I probably do buried somewhere, but they are probably all on Apple II media, and I'd have to dig a machine out of storage to read them! :-)
Here is why Microsoft and/or Mundie won't sue Linus...
If they did, it would be a huge PR disaster for them.
For one, it would be publically acknowledging that such a simple statement, flippant though it might be, could piss them off. It certainly wouldn't make them look like the kind of mature and rational company they want the heads of large businesses to think they are.
Secondly, it would give Linus and Linux a huge amount of free publicity, and while their 'declaration of war' already is doing that, an actual lawsuit in a court of law is more difficult to control than the court of public opinion. Microsoft can afford to spend billions on astroturf campaigns and use advertising dollars to strongarm the media, but judges have this damned independant streak that make them unpredictable. Microsoft has maybe learned a little about that recently, and I think they might not want to go there if they don't have to.
Thirdly, if Microsoft thinks they are too often the target of the ill will of the technical community now, attacking a well respected figure like Linus would certainly worsen that situation.
But when the majority didn't voted for you (check the number of vote) you have to be carefull.
Interestingly enough the majority didn't vote for Bill Clinton either. Neither in 1992 nor 1996. Due to H. Ross Perot acting as spoiler and splitting the right and moderate vote, Clinton managed to be elected with no more than 42% of the popular vote or so compared to 38 or 39% for George Bush Sr. and Bob Dole. Had Perot not run in either case it is highly unlikely Clinton would have won given that Perot took a lot more votes away from the Republican candidate than from Clinton.
To be fair, it was Ralph Nader who cost Al Gore the election, acting as spoiler, he got more than the narrow margin of victory's worth of votes in Florida, and it is likely Gore would have won Florida had Nader not been running.
I believe that G.W. Bush actually got a bigger percentage of the popular vote than Bill Clinton did in either '92 or '96, despite narrowly losing the popular vote (Perot got a lot more votes than Nader did). Of course, as we all know, it is the Electoral College that matters...
we're two different trolls, moron
Uh, yea, like it is real easy for us to tell when you are both anonymous cowards.
- and i wasn't trolling.
Whatever.
lotus 1-2-3 is no competition for even gnumeric, and if your product can't stand up to a half-ass beta written by a bunch of whiskey addicted 17 year olds, it doesn't belong on the market.
I say let the market decide. And can you bother to give me more details on how 1-2-3 is inferior to Gnumeric, or am I just supposed to take your word for it. Not to belittle you, but I have no idea who the heck you are, so I can only judge your arguments by their merit or lack thereof. And your across the board assault on the character of the Gnome developers does little to lend credence to your arguments.
i don't want them to release it because i don't want some sentimental idiot like yourself getting all misty eyed over his supposed 1-2-3 l33t-4ss scripting skillz0rz and asking me to install and maintain it on a perfectly-well running linux network.
Sheesh. Who urinated in your dry breakfast cerial. Like installing a little software is such a big freaking deal for someone who obviously thinks they are cthulu's gift to sysadmins. And I've got enough experience with Linux not to believe that merely adding a piece of commercial software is going to suddently make it not 'well running'. And I'm not very sentimental about Lotus, I never really used their products that heavily.
if they did release it, it'd be closed-source anyways and therefor worse than useless.
Ah... the "everything must be free" argument. Well, I would like that in a perfect world, but in reality, life isn't so simple, and sometimes you have to deal with commercial products.
Hey... I use vi all the time. Although I generally use Perl instead of awk these days.
That being said, I wasn't implying that evolution in software was necessarily a bad thing, rather that it isn't mandatory for a port of a peice of software to be a good thing. If a package was good at one time, it is probably still useful now, and having it available is better than not.
I'd also like to think that as software evolves, it should get better, and I am not sure that always happens. Sometimes I think that when things are just added and added and added, that a product can become worse rather than better.
Does it really need to? I dunno about anyone else, but from what I see out there in the business world, most of the users barely know how to use a tiny fraction of the software they have. Most of the features in the popular software is dead weight for most people, most of the time. When it comes right down to it in general office productivity software, I'm not completely convinced that there really has been a lot of improvement in the overall capabilities of software in the past several years, and this is true of most of the big commercial vendors, not just Microsoft. Almost all of the new features I see touted in newer versions of office suites seem like they are mostly fluff to me.
Well, at least I know what kind of "troll" you are now... :-)
.xls files people have sent me and to edit and print some expense reimbursement forms).
That being said, if you really feel that way then why be worried if IBM was to enter the market with Lotus SmartSuite? I don't see more options and more competition as a bad thing.
I haven't looked at Abiword recently, but I have to say I've been pretty favorably impressed with Gnumeric the last couple of times I've used it (mainly to open