Your first two examples are Microsoft products. Microsoft has huge resources to draw upon when it decides to enter a market, and can afford to sell at a loss for a long time. Sun does not and cannot.
Linux was not at all "too late". In fact, it was invented at just the right moment. The Internet was exploding, and lots of people wanted to run Unix servers on commodity hardware. Proprietary Unixes were expensive and in many cases hard to get a hold of. (At the time, there were many complaints from Sun customers that they couldn't find anybody to sell them a license to Solaris/x86; Sun was still in its SPARC Uber Alles mode.) Besides, as an Open Source OS, Linux could evolve quickly to meet people's needs. Indeed, Linux's success is not so much a vindication of Linux itself as it is of the open source development model.
I don't know what figures you're looking at, but from where I sit Red Hat is still top dog. It's true that more people download free copies of Ubuntu workstation than free copies of Red Hat workstation (mainly because Red Hat abandoned workstation products for a while). But in the server marketplace, which is where companies like Red Hat and Canonical (the company behind Ubuntu) actually make their living, the server version of Ubuntu doesn't even come close to RHEL or SUSE. I'm not even sure they're third.
That said, Solaris does have a tiny chance to overtake Linux. The trick is to make it easy for Linux developers and administrators to make the switch. That means a lot of work porting tools and libraries. If Sun does that, they'll have no problem getting folks to give Solaris a try — at which point the OS will sell itself, with its superior performance and features. But getting past the "why doesn't X work the way I'm used to" stage is key.
I have some personal experience in this area. A few months ago, I implemented a TWiki for my group. For that, I needed Perl. Not just the basic Perl runtime, but tons of Perl modules to support all the TWiki plugins I planned to run.
My hardware was a Sun V20z, an x64 box that already had Solaris on it. I really wanted to give Solaris a fair shot. (Guess where I work?) Now, Solaris comes with a nice solid Perl implementation. But I soon found that many of the Perl modules I needed had never been tested on Solaris. (Not surprising, since module contributers typically have access to Linux, and maybe Windows.) In many cases, I couldn't even get the install scripts to work. OK, it's not that hard to install a Perl module by hand. (Tedious, though.) But finally I came to a Perl module that had a dependency on an obscure feature of an obscure C compiler. Solaris has the compiler, but not the feature! This is where I gave up. Removed the Solaris partition and installed Fedora. Installing the Perl modules I needed, with the CPAN module managing dependencies for me, was a matter of minutes.
So if I were in charge of the Solaris-beats-Linux effort, the first thing I'd do is go to CPAN and start QAing popular modules on Solaris. Perl, after all, is the duct tape of the Internet. And who would use a tool that's incompatible with duct tape?
The web locker isn't just a file storage space. It's where students download assignments, upload homework, collaborate with other students, etc.
Of course any technically clueful student will have a thumb drive, unofficial email and IM accounts, and lots of other places to stash/do stuff they don't want teachers and parents to know about. (Though not all students are technically clueful, and the school will try to prevent such unmonitored activity.) But all the stuff they're supposed to be doing will live on the official server.
This school portal idea (which is kind of obvious/inevitable) is less interesting than the laptop program itself. There's still a lot of argument over whether laptops for this age group are a boon or a distraction.
Previously, HP had offered this desktop computer with a choice of Vista Business, XP, and FreeDOS. In the latter case, this was almost always replaced by users with a Linux distribution.
Almost always? Are there there still people who consider DOS their primary working environment?
Oh wait, geeks now want dirt cheap computers instead of top of the line machines?
Not everything that happens in the Linux world is about what geeks want. (Shocking, but true.) The #1 goal of Linux advocates has always been to break Windows' desktop monopoly. If big companies like HP and Dell are seriously marketing Linux/PC bundles, they must think there's a market for them. That would mean that corporate buyers and ordinary consumers (that is, the non-geeks who actually buy 99% of all computers) are finally beginning to accept Linux as a serious alternative to Windows.
"Fail safe" does not mean "cannot fail". (No such thing.) It means "designed to fail safely." For example, brake systems that are designed to lock up if the brake fluid leaks.
Usually when people say "fail safe" they mean "foolproof". Foolproof systems do exist, but only until some fool figures out how to circumvent them!
It pretty much has to be. I can't picture anybody getting an Easter egg like this as an assignment.
I used to be blown away by the way impressive new features appear in Google products with little or no fanfare. Contrast this with the way most companies treat every little achievement as if it were the Second Coming. But now it seems obvious that these things are released so quietly because nobody knows about them, except the people working on them. And that much uncoordinated work in not a good sign in a software development org.
You might wonder if I'm making too much of this. After all, it's only 20% of their engineering effort. But is it? It's hard to keep track of how developers spend their time even when you have good managers. And Google barely has any managers. People I've met who work there talk (and sometimes complain) about low manager/contributor ratios and almost almost no supervision. Which makes me suspect that many folks spend most of their time on their "20%" and only do enough of their official assignments to avoid pissing off their managers — managers they hardly ever see. Meanwhile, serious bugs go unfixed and major projects lag behind schedule.
It's nice to see the right people being held accountable for a change.
Idiot Even if this really were Microsoft's fuck up (and for once, it's not) refusing to workaround the bug doesn't "hold them accountable". It just screws over the users.
It's ironic how often people use words like "accountable" and "responsible" when they're trying to pass the buck.
I have no respect for RMS, so I can say that it's perfectly consistent that he dresses like a hippie. He has the same self righteous attitude, the same fondness for weird change-the-world schemes, and the same ignorance of real-world economics. If he weren't so good at getting grants, he'd be living in a school bus in Santa Cruz.
Sure, I could spend a lot of time writing whiny letters to TV networks demanding to know why they some shows on the web but not others, or why they canceled this show but not that one. There's only one problem: I don't care. It's just TV. I enjoy it, but I don't obsess about it. I don't have much of a life, but I have more of a one than that.
I don't have any faith that this will get better because most people have cable (including me) and there really -isn't- another choice.
Actually, the main reason it won't get better is that you haven't sprung for a good antenna. (Not that you should, since you have cable.) The problems with over-the-air TV reception are due to fundamental bandwidth limitations. Aside from taking measures to improve your physical connection (which is the purpose both of fancy antennas and cable) there's no fix, and there wouldn't be even if people were willing to pay for it.
Some people don't get all broadcast networks without cable. (I can't get Fox at all, and CBS and CW have very poor picture quality.) But Zonk is still being a twit: NBC streams recent eps of Heroes for free on nbc.com.
I don't much care for Heroes, but I'd like to watch Battlestar Galactica without waiting for it to come out on DVD. So I opened an iTunes account and bought a couple of eps — and discovered that the version of Quicktime that you have to upgrade to in order to run iTunes can't keep the sound in sync with the picture on my PC. (No problem with the old version of QuickTime.) Thought it might be my antiquated hardware, but the new LE1600 I just bought has the same problem.
Oh well, $2 is too much to pay to watch a TV show anyway.
To be honest, I don't really care about that. I just find it laughable that people with only a casual understanding of the law can get so strident about subtle legal issues that experienced lawyers don't agree about.
Yeah I never liked the idea of government run internet access. First it is anti-competitive...
Right, because private companies are just falling over themselves to create WiFi networks.
But in fact they're not. When there's a need (I'm not convinced that we really need municipal WiFi, but let's suppose we do) for a service, and the private sector isn't interested, it makes perfect sense for the government to either provide the service or charter somebody to do it.
Delivering letters is the classic example. If you left it to the private sector, you'd get hot competition where there's lots of letters to be delivered, and expensive, poor service in rural areas. That's why postal systems are either government services or government sponsored monopolies.
Actually, the EU is experimenting with competitive postal systems, but I'm skeptical that it's going to work out. Bottom line: free enterprise is cool, but it can't do everything.
Actually, I get a lot fewer "flamebait" and "troll" mods since I started using that sig. Which is what I hoped to accomplish. But there are still lots of nitwits who consider these mods an acceptable way to say "bullshit!"
Not only a proprietary format, but Real has always been very aggressive about going after people who try to interoperate without paying for the privilege. Which makes the fancy ripping features of RP 11 just a little ironic.
Well, it's probably not a lot of money (maybe 25 cents if you have a really horrible long-distance plan). But yes, anybody who doesn't have flat rate long distance gets billed for every call, even calls less than a minute. And most plans round up. So 20 seconds is the same as 60.
Not that anybody cares. There are better ways to get the time. Cell phones, radio watches, GPS devices...
It's interesting that you're unaware of long distance billing issues. Did you grow up only using systems that don't charge tolls? (Cell phones, IP phones, and lately long distance companies have gone to flat rates in order to compete.) If so, that makes you a post-Ma-Bell person and me a dinosaur!
The only source for this is MSNBC (I've been unable to find another reference to this event that doesn't link them) and they've made no attempt to report this objectively. Obviously done by somebody on the "news of the weird" beat.
I find it unlikely that the Chinese government (for whom dialectical materialism is still official dogma) really believes in reincarnation, never mind their own ability to regulate it. What's probably happened is that the government has claimed the right to appoint the hierarchy of Tibetan Buddhism, something they've already done for other sects. Since each important Tibetan Buddhist leader is considered the reincarnation of his predecessor, they are, in effect, asserting control over the Buddhist hierarchy's right to reincarnate.
What this means is that when the current Dalai Lama dies, Tibetans outside of China will "discover" his successor outside China, and Tibetans inside will "discover" his successor inside China. So you'll have two Dalai Lamas, one approved by the Chinese government, one not. If you look at it seriously and stop looking to make a joke out of it, it's a case of a government that pretends to honor freedom of religion, but is actually less than tolerant. Nothing to laugh about.
Except that's a toll call for most of us. Unless you have a cell phone plan with unlimited long distance. In which case you just have to look at your cell phone to get the exact time.
Come to think of it, cell phones are probably the main reason nobody calls POPCORN any more. I'd like to say "the Internet", but in fact few people have the time clients on their desktops properly configured.
You're right, fossil fuels have hellish environmental effects. And not just during extraction and refinement either. (I'm looking out the window at the smog over San Francisco bay as I write this.) But the gpp claimed that solar power was "virtually pollution free." That's nonsense. Solar power may produce a tiny fraction of the pollution of fossil fuels, but it's still a long way from being pollution free.
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Your first two examples are Microsoft products. Microsoft has huge resources to draw upon when it decides to enter a market, and can afford to sell at a loss for a long time. Sun does not and cannot.
Linux was not at all "too late". In fact, it was invented at just the right moment. The Internet was exploding, and lots of people wanted to run Unix servers on commodity hardware. Proprietary Unixes were expensive and in many cases hard to get a hold of. (At the time, there were many complaints from Sun customers that they couldn't find anybody to sell them a license to Solaris/x86; Sun was still in its SPARC Uber Alles mode.) Besides, as an Open Source OS, Linux could evolve quickly to meet people's needs. Indeed, Linux's success is not so much a vindication of Linux itself as it is of the open source development model.
I don't know what figures you're looking at, but from where I sit Red Hat is still top dog. It's true that more people download free copies of Ubuntu workstation than free copies of Red Hat workstation (mainly because Red Hat abandoned workstation products for a while). But in the server marketplace, which is where companies like Red Hat and Canonical (the company behind Ubuntu) actually make their living, the server version of Ubuntu doesn't even come close to RHEL or SUSE. I'm not even sure they're third.
That said, Solaris does have a tiny chance to overtake Linux. The trick is to make it easy for Linux developers and administrators to make the switch. That means a lot of work porting tools and libraries. If Sun does that, they'll have no problem getting folks to give Solaris a try — at which point the OS will sell itself, with its superior performance and features. But getting past the "why doesn't X work the way I'm used to" stage is key.
I have some personal experience in this area. A few months ago, I implemented a TWiki for my group. For that, I needed Perl. Not just the basic Perl runtime, but tons of Perl modules to support all the TWiki plugins I planned to run.
My hardware was a Sun V20z, an x64 box that already had Solaris on it. I really wanted to give Solaris a fair shot. (Guess where I work?) Now, Solaris comes with a nice solid Perl implementation. But I soon found that many of the Perl modules I needed had never been tested on Solaris. (Not surprising, since module contributers typically have access to Linux, and maybe Windows.) In many cases, I couldn't even get the install scripts to work. OK, it's not that hard to install a Perl module by hand. (Tedious, though.) But finally I came to a Perl module that had a dependency on an obscure feature of an obscure C compiler. Solaris has the compiler, but not the feature! This is where I gave up. Removed the Solaris partition and installed Fedora. Installing the Perl modules I needed, with the CPAN module managing dependencies for me, was a matter of minutes.
So if I were in charge of the Solaris-beats-Linux effort, the first thing I'd do is go to CPAN and start QAing popular modules on Solaris. Perl, after all, is the duct tape of the Internet. And who would use a tool that's incompatible with duct tape?
The web locker isn't just a file storage space. It's where students download assignments, upload homework, collaborate with other students, etc.
Of course any technically clueful student will have a thumb drive, unofficial email and IM accounts, and lots of other places to stash/do stuff they don't want teachers and parents to know about. (Though not all students are technically clueful, and the school will try to prevent such unmonitored activity.) But all the stuff they're supposed to be doing will live on the official server.
This school portal idea (which is kind of obvious/inevitable) is less interesting than the laptop program itself. There's still a lot of argument over whether laptops for this age group are a boon or a distraction.
"Fail safe" does not mean "cannot fail". (No such thing.) It means "designed to fail safely." For example, brake systems that are designed to lock up if the brake fluid leaks.
Usually when people say "fail safe" they mean "foolproof". Foolproof systems do exist, but only until some fool figures out how to circumvent them!
It pretty much has to be. I can't picture anybody getting an Easter egg like this as an assignment.
I used to be blown away by the way impressive new features appear in Google products with little or no fanfare. Contrast this with the way most companies treat every little achievement as if it were the Second Coming. But now it seems obvious that these things are released so quietly because nobody knows about them, except the people working on them. And that much uncoordinated work in not a good sign in a software development org.
You might wonder if I'm making too much of this. After all, it's only 20% of their engineering effort. But is it? It's hard to keep track of how developers spend their time even when you have good managers. And Google barely has any managers. People I've met who work there talk (and sometimes complain) about low manager/contributor ratios and almost almost no supervision. Which makes me suspect that many folks spend most of their time on their "20%" and only do enough of their official assignments to avoid pissing off their managers — managers they hardly ever see. Meanwhile, serious bugs go unfixed and major projects lag behind schedule.
It's ironic how often people use words like "accountable" and "responsible" when they're trying to pass the buck.
I have no respect for RMS, so I can say that it's perfectly consistent that he dresses like a hippie. He has the same self righteous attitude, the same fondness for weird change-the-world schemes, and the same ignorance of real-world economics. If he weren't so good at getting grants, he'd be living in a school bus in Santa Cruz.
Sure, I could spend a lot of time writing whiny letters to TV networks demanding to know why they some shows on the web but not others, or why they canceled this show but not that one. There's only one problem: I don't care. It's just TV. I enjoy it, but I don't obsess about it. I don't have much of a life, but I have more of a one than that.
Some people don't get all broadcast networks without cable. (I can't get Fox at all, and CBS and CW have very poor picture quality.) But Zonk is still being a twit: NBC streams recent eps of Heroes for free on nbc.com.
I don't much care for Heroes, but I'd like to watch Battlestar Galactica without waiting for it to come out on DVD. So I opened an iTunes account and bought a couple of eps — and discovered that the version of Quicktime that you have to upgrade to in order to run iTunes can't keep the sound in sync with the picture on my PC. (No problem with the old version of QuickTime.) Thought it might be my antiquated hardware, but the new LE1600 I just bought has the same problem.
Oh well, $2 is too much to pay to watch a TV show anyway.
To be honest, I don't really care about that. I just find it laughable that people with only a casual understanding of the law can get so strident about subtle legal issues that experienced lawyers don't agree about.
But in fact they're not. When there's a need (I'm not convinced that we really need municipal WiFi, but let's suppose we do) for a service, and the private sector isn't interested, it makes perfect sense for the government to either provide the service or charter somebody to do it.
Delivering letters is the classic example. If you left it to the private sector, you'd get hot competition where there's lots of letters to be delivered, and expensive, poor service in rural areas. That's why postal systems are either government services or government sponsored monopolies.
Actually, the EU is experimenting with competitive postal systems, but I'm skeptical that it's going to work out. Bottom line: free enterprise is cool, but it can't do everything.
Since artificial life is the only kind they're every going to get!
Dude, you're confused. I'm the one who knows he's not a legal expert.
Yet another amateur lawyer thread. Readers are cautioned not to make decisions based on the "information" above.
Actually, I get a lot fewer "flamebait" and "troll" mods since I started using that sig. Which is what I hoped to accomplish. But there are still lots of nitwits who consider these mods an acceptable way to say "bullshit!"
I think you clicked the wrong reply button. I don't have a blog, unless you count my Slashdot journal, which I haven't updated in months.
Not only a proprietary format, but Real has always been very aggressive about going after people who try to interoperate without paying for the privilege. Which makes the fancy ripping features of RP 11 just a little ironic.
Well, it's probably not a lot of money (maybe 25 cents if you have a really horrible long-distance plan). But yes, anybody who doesn't have flat rate long distance gets billed for every call, even calls less than a minute. And most plans round up. So 20 seconds is the same as 60.
Not that anybody cares. There are better ways to get the time. Cell phones, radio watches, GPS devices...
It's interesting that you're unaware of long distance billing issues. Did you grow up only using systems that don't charge tolls? (Cell phones, IP phones, and lately long distance companies have gone to flat rates in order to compete.) If so, that makes you a post-Ma-Bell person and me a dinosaur!
The only source for this is MSNBC (I've been unable to find another reference to this event that doesn't link them) and they've made no attempt to report this objectively. Obviously done by somebody on the "news of the weird" beat.
I find it unlikely that the Chinese government (for whom dialectical materialism is still official dogma) really believes in reincarnation, never mind their own ability to regulate it. What's probably happened is that the government has claimed the right to appoint the hierarchy of Tibetan Buddhism, something they've already done for other sects. Since each important Tibetan Buddhist leader is considered the reincarnation of his predecessor, they are, in effect, asserting control over the Buddhist hierarchy's right to reincarnate.
What this means is that when the current Dalai Lama dies, Tibetans outside of China will "discover" his successor outside China, and Tibetans inside will "discover" his successor inside China. So you'll have two Dalai Lamas, one approved by the Chinese government, one not. If you look at it seriously and stop looking to make a joke out of it, it's a case of a government that pretends to honor freedom of religion, but is actually less than tolerant. Nothing to laugh about.
Except that's a toll call for most of us. Unless you have a cell phone plan with unlimited long distance. In which case you just have to look at your cell phone to get the exact time.
Come to think of it, cell phones are probably the main reason nobody calls POPCORN any more. I'd like to say "the Internet", but in fact few people have the time clients on their desktops properly configured.
You're right, fossil fuels have hellish environmental effects. And not just during extraction and refinement either. (I'm looking out the window at the smog over San Francisco bay as I write this.) But the gpp claimed that solar power was "virtually pollution free." That's nonsense. Solar power may produce a tiny fraction of the pollution of fossil fuels, but it's still a long way from being pollution free.
I don't remember anybody in Futurama talking to their own head.