Sell a cheap machine and offer the possibility to several linux vendors to get their wares pre-installed. Let them compete with one another and get the best price for the software and the best software packages.
I've gotta hand it to Walmart, they have really figured out how this game should work. I realize that right now, they are offering 3 distros, but ultimately I suspect that, for support purposes it will be easier to trim it down later on. They can just let these guys fight it out for a while to see which one gets the best response from the public.
You don't need a T-1. I've got speakeasy DSL. They let me run servers, they don't care what I do with my network. They openly encourage people to get wireless equipment and share their network with the neighbors.
They cost more than cable modems and most RBOC offered DSL services and they are worth every penny. I'm sure many people will flee the cable modem subscriber roles when caps are rolled out, and I'm sure this will make lots of providers happy. AT&T doesn't want these people on their networks, and there are other providers out there who will gladly take these customers (and charge them a little more for the privelege).
It boils down the old standard that you get what you pay for.
Sorry, should have read the article instead of making the ignorant assumption that the person who submitted the article actually read it. I am humbled...
But it was a really good excuse to use "badger" in a comment. Haven't done that in far too long. It's no weasel, but badger does well too.
See, all of you people were over-reacting! Genetically modifying crops is perfectly safe and we understand all of the ramifications of everything we are doing. I mean sure there was a leap from corn to soy beans, but that's well within tolerances. Now, if the gentic modifications had jumped to say, badgers, then that would be something to have concern about. As it now stands this just demonstrates that all precautions are being taken and that we are perfectly safe.
... is because they can get away with selling it for what they sell it at. The only correlation between cost of production and the cost of the item is that the cost of production is the bare minimum you can sell it for in the long run. Ultimately prices are determined by how many copies of the software you can reasonably sell without driving people to a competing product. Because of Microsoft's monopoly on the market, they can keep these prices higher because the barrier to entry for any competition is greater.
But anyhow, the cost of XP's actualy physical production and shipping is insigificant. What costs money for these products to be made is software developers and marketing. RedHat does some marketing, but it's all much lower cost and lower visibility advertising. RedHat pays only a small percentage of the cost of the development of Linux, funding a few key developers, and people to package and test their distro.
So really XP should cost a whole lot more. The fact that Linux still has trouble making headway despite it's substantially lower cost is indicative of the problem with the market.
In reading your comment, something occurred to me.
The only live capable game I have at the moment is Mech Assault, which is a great game, but I was hoping for a couple more play modes, including Co-Op.
One of the most popular FPS shooters is still Half Life because of the Counterstrike mod. Gamers took a basic game and changed it completely to become the kind of game that they wanted. With an XBox, this isn't going to happen because Microsoft has to keep tight control over the game licensing. If they don't they can't make back all the money they lose on selling the boxes. Furthermore, to even begin writing games you have to buy their SDK which is very expensive for an amateur developer.
This was one of the promises of the Indrema game console that was making me really look forward to its release which will now never happen.
This dimension has been around for quite a while. Most FPS and RTS games include some form of voice communication these days.
I've found that if you have a good crew of players on a server it can really add to the community feel of the game. On the other hand, it makes it really easy for one person to be an annoying pain. Nothing more fun annoying than logging on for a little saturday night mayhem to realize that there's a couple stone/drunk people on the server making a racket.
The one thing I've been dissapointed with when it comes to voice chat systems is that they never seem to get used to their potential. Especially in the more realistic FPS games (counterstrike, tom clancy games, etc), it could be really cool to be doing coordinated tactics with the voice communications. Unfortunately it seems that only a few people really take it to that level.
What will be interesting to see with Xbox live though is how the groups are managed on their servers. With a PC game, the host is usually just another PC owner, or some group run server. Good server operators will keep cheaters and other irritants off the server. I'm curious to see how this will play out with XBox live since, AFAIK, Microsoft is doing all the hosting.
What happens is that they make a bunch of layoffs and in the short run their productivity goes up because the same amount of work is being done by less people. While that is true, this is a temporary phenomenon. What ends up happening is that people, who are now overworked, begin looking for other opportunities. In a tight market these may be hard to find, but they'll begin to trickle in.
Companies who don't overwork their employees in this manner will find that it's easier for them to find top notch talent as people seek to jump ship from companies that do overwork them. The companies who do overwork their employees discover in the meantime that they have a number of key defections and that these people end up being replaced by less qualified people, becuase the best people won't put up with them. So they go out and hire more people because the less qualified people can't do the job as effectively as one qualified person.
So, they eventually end up with a large work force, some of whom have, in the mean time, become quite good at their jobs. Then they realize that they've now got all this dead weight again. Layoffs happen.
Wash. Rinse. Repeat.
Smart companies show their employees some loyalty in the bad times because it will be reciprocated in the good times. This leads to an overall more qualified and stable staff. That leads to increased productivity in the long run.
I love evolution, but Bayesian filtering seems like such a great answer to the spam problem that I'm willing to toss Evolution out in favor of Mozilla (even though I find that in most respects Evolution is a superior mail client).
I use spamassassin right now and it works pretty well, but it does tend to give false positives with enough frequency that I have to still pay occasional attention to the spam. It makes it easier to quickly sort through the junk, but the spam is still wasting my time because of it.
Fine, yes, the movie leaked. So, the question that needs to be asked here is this: does the move studio lose money from this action?
I tend to believe that the loss of money is negligible. How many people are honestly going to spend the hours or days it will take to download the complete film? Now, out of those people, how many are going to watch it on their computer and then not bother to go to the theater or purchase it later on DVD. Finally, out of those who do this, how many would have gone and paid for a ticket or bought the DVD had this movie not been available on-line. I'm confident that this is a pretty insignificant percentage of movie viewers.
If they aren't losing money and those "pirating" the movie aren't making money, then why do the studios need protection? Copyright law is intended to protect their ability to exclusively profit from their work, and that is indeed happening. So, screw the studios, they've got all the legal tools they need to legitimately defend their copyright as it now stands. So let's just leave it at that and move on.
These corporations seem to be of the mistaken opinion that they can make a decision like this without repercussions. There logic is probably that if they, Sony, Vivendi, and Time Warner, all decide to just put their foot down and tell customers to shove it, there will be nothing we can do.
Even assuming that all of them do agree to do this, and that somehow, they aren't prosecuted for illegal collusion for this seemingly coordinated assault, the only people that are going to suffer for this is the labels and the artists who sign with them. People will just stop buying CD's if they won't work in their players. Class action lawsuits will happen because the media industry is releasing intentionally deffective products.
My expectation is that over the coming years their sales will continue to drop because nobody wants to buy a deffective product. People who have, for ethical reasons, decided to go out and actually buy CD's will see no reason to do so going forward. They'll try to pass a bunch of new laws to save themselves from the beast they've unleashed, and though some may pass, eventually through citizen outrage these new laws are going to get shut down.
So, BMG, and EMI, I say fuck you and the horse you rode in on. I don't need your music, I've got local bands, freely distrubted independent artists online, and intelligently run on-line music services like E-music. You will not see one more dime of my hard earned money in this lifetime.
There is no such thing as a crypto key that is impossibile to crack. What it comes down to is how improbably it is to crack it. In this example, it took 10,000 computers 549 days to crack it and it's only 109 bits. At 163 bits, that's a doubling in difficulty for ever additional bit.
Just add a bit, and suddenly you've pushed off the efficiencies gained by moore's law for another 18 months. By going to 163 bits, you've got a good 80 years before the that key can be broken in the same time as this 109 bit key. Frankly I wouldn't be too worried about that problem.
As long as your crypto is good enough to make it too expensive to crack for those who might want to crack it, you've got no worries. And I don't see a lot of people out there able to throw together the 10K computers to crack a key who also don't mind wasting almost two years on the effort.
Blogs... Instant messaging... Have you seen how much of on-line interaction these days circles around things that require substantial text input to use. Sure, I might occasionally just go out and surf, but is anybody really willing to go and blow another $1000 on computer equipment to do that?
The funny thing is that the people who are most likely to be willing to blow $1000 on a whiz bang gadget are the ones least likely to find a tablet PC useful. Tech savvy consumers, are the ones who are more likely to be blogging and IM'ing people which would be a pain in the butt to do with a tablet PC.
Furthermore, if I want to surf while sitting on the couch, a laptop is an excellent form factor frankly. I tried using a tablet (yes, I have one) on the couch and it's a pain because I have to prop it up somehow so that I can read it. This means sitting at strange angles and I can't shift around very much. On the other hand, a laptop, I just plop it on my lap, flip up the screen and I can sit anyway I want.
Table PC's are good for medical but what else?
on
Transmeta Needs Microsoft
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Except for a few limited fields, tablet PC's are really not ideal. They are well suited to any field where you need some portability, and expect to be doing more data viewing than entry. The field that is most obviously well suited to this is the medical field. There you have X-rays, tests, etc, that can all be loaded from a central server and you only need to make small annotations. You need some portability, but not much.
The problem is that not many fields really fit that bill. You usually want either total portability or very limited portability (thus making the laptop or PDA a good choice). Furthermore you sacrifice a lot of your ability to do data entry on a tablet PC with only a limited gain in portability. A well designed PDA is actually far superior for data entry because I can use a thumb keyboard and enter data quickly. A tablet requires one hand to hold the thing, and then the other to do data entry.
I've used them and I've found that, for the most part, they are solving a problem that I've never had. I suspect that it's a problem very few people have, so except in a few niche fields tablets aren't going to be a big thing. So buhbye transmeta.
Microsoft has a history of making settlements like this and then doing everything that can to weasel out of it. So I'm wondering if this agreement is really going to set up a framework that effectively keeps Microsoft in check. Even if the framework does support this, do you believe the justice department will be aggressive enough with its enforcement to take advantage of it?
Microsoft seems to be playing the part of the spoiled child here. The parents keep saying he's doing bad things and that he should stop, but they never back up their threats with effective action. I can't imagine Microsoft changing its ways anytime soon unless this agreement is actually setting up significant consequences for them.
People once dumped their inexpensive Apple II's, Commodores and TRS-80's for the more expensive IBM PC. The possiblity certainly exists that Mac OSX could take off in a big way, particularly since it is both easier to use than Windows, and more powerful.
People dumped their inexpensive Apple II's and Commodores and TRS-80's because they all used IBM PC's at work and it made more sense to have the same machine at home as they had at work. Eventually the market share of these machines lead to the vast majority of software being developed for them and so they came to take over the market.
Linux distros are merely repackagers of software, slapping a user "friendly" veneers over it. There's nothing stopping a third party from slapping a better veneer over FreeBSD or NetBSD. This is what Apple did, and they're doing great because of it.
Doing great? In Q1 of 2002, Apple's market share for new computer sales was less than 3% of the market. That has been the case since at least 1999, regardless of OS X. They are hanging on to what they've got, but there's little evidence that they are going to be making any serious head way anytime soon.
I learned the painful lesson of the network effect back in the days of Atari. I an Atari 1040ST computer, and it was superior in every way to an IBM PC except for one REALLY important way. There were more IBM PC's out there. So, support for software dwindled, and my computer became worthless before it's time.
Linux becomes a viable option because it has a strong community of people around it developing for it. So even though there's not as much support amongst commercial vendors, one can accomplish a lot on Linux without them. So Linux isn't as hurt by the network effect as Apple is (especially because Linux runs on the same hardware as Windows).
But in order for linux to have real success going against Microsoft going forward, one of two things must happen. Either the nature of the computer marketplace has to change drastically or Linux has to be able to act as a drop-in replacement for Windows in existing networks. The first option is a possibility, no argument, but increasingly the second path is becoming very difficult.
What do the Samba people do when they can't implement Microsoft protocols? Do they start offering a closed source royalty laden version? I mean who would buy it when they can get that "free" from Microsoft. What happens when the people start writing.Net software figuring they can run it on mono and then discover that a new Microsoft API is available that's only available under windows because the new API's got a number of patents and royalty fees associated with it?
I'm not saying that somebody overthrowing Microsoft is impossible, but Linux is the best threat now. I think that this court case, had it ended in a better way, had a chance of helping out that cause. Linux may still do it on its own, but it's going to be a lot harder.
The point of this agreement is to, through court action, create genuine competition in the marketplace. The agreement falls short of this. Yes, people may choose to use Free software for whatever reasons, but if Free software is the only thing that's got a chance at competing, the agrement should address that. It doesn't, and that's what I'm saying.
Should any company have to give out such information such that it can be used in free software? No. But, this is a monopoly, and the rules change drasitcally when you are dealing with a monopoly.
the only other thing of interest was that they are supposed to open up any communication protocol that is needed in windows (SMB for instance).
Yup, but it won't help Samba. Microsoft is allowed to charge fair and non-discriminatory royalties for the information. They can also restrict the ability of 3rd parties to re-distribute and sub-license the information.
Ultimately the only serious competition Microsoft faces at this time is from Linux. Thus anything in this settlement that helps or hinders Linux is what's going to make a real difference in competition. Reading through the settlement, Linux cannot take advantage of any of this.
To summarize, there are several clauses about opening up the API's and protocols. This openess must be provided to OEM's, etc, on a "reasonable and non-discriminatory basis". This "reasonable and non-discrimantor" rule allows for charging of royalties and restricting distribution and sub-licensing of the intellectual property. So even if they provide this information at no cost or minimal cost they can make it impossible for any such information to every make it into GPL software.
So folks, I hope you enjoyed have your tax dollars flushed down a toilet.
Welcome to the future of transnational corporate governance ladies and gentlemen. Organizations get set up that are effectively untouchable by any national government, and are unbeholden to passe concepts like democratic representation. I mean right now this organization can pretty much do whatever it wants as long as they don't go far enough to drive all the network administrators in the world to start using a different root name server. And that, my friends, would be pretty damn far.
I read the middleware company's conclusions and was sad to see that Java lost. It looked like everything was pretty legit (certainly more so than some past endeavors like this). But then I read the article refuting it. It seems that there's a substantial amount of optimizations that were not done on the J2EE code that could have had a huge impact.
Basically when you get down to it, this is an impossible comparison to make. The architectures are different, the app servers are different, and the people writing the code are different. Trying to yield objective results out of such subjective measurements is impossible.
Just remember, if it's a big corporation, default to hating it. Just makes life much easier. For example:
your friend: Did you hear that big corporation X is polluting the environment, killing babies, supporting Al Qaeda, and paying third world labor in lint balls?
your reaction: Eh, I already hated them
Then you can go about your day unphased by their crimes. Much easier that way.
Slashdot Mirror
You misread my intent :)
Basically what I'm getting at is that this is the way the market would work on a larger scale if the market wasn't so scewed by Microsoft's monopoly.
Sell a cheap machine and offer the possibility to several linux vendors to get their wares pre-installed. Let them compete with one another and get the best price for the software and the best software packages.
I've gotta hand it to Walmart, they have really figured out how this game should work. I realize that right now, they are offering 3 distros, but ultimately I suspect that, for support purposes it will be easier to trim it down later on. They can just let these guys fight it out for a while to see which one gets the best response from the public.
You don't need a T-1. I've got speakeasy DSL. They let me run servers, they don't care what I do with my network. They openly encourage people to get wireless equipment and share their network with the neighbors.
They cost more than cable modems and most RBOC offered DSL services and they are worth every penny. I'm sure many people will flee the cable modem subscriber roles when caps are rolled out, and I'm sure this will make lots of providers happy. AT&T doesn't want these people on their networks, and there are other providers out there who will gladly take these customers (and charge them a little more for the privelege).
It boils down the old standard that you get what you pay for.
Sorry, should have read the article instead of making the ignorant assumption that the person who submitted the article actually read it. I am humbled...
But it was a really good excuse to use "badger" in a comment. Haven't done that in far too long. It's no weasel, but badger does well too.
See, all of you people were over-reacting! Genetically modifying crops is perfectly safe and we understand all of the ramifications of everything we are doing. I mean sure there was a leap from corn to soy beans, but that's well within tolerances. Now, if the gentic modifications had jumped to say, badgers, then that would be something to have concern about. As it now stands this just demonstrates that all precautions are being taken and that we are perfectly safe.
... is because they can get away with selling it for what they sell it at. The only correlation between cost of production and the cost of the item is that the cost of production is the bare minimum you can sell it for in the long run. Ultimately prices are determined by how many copies of the software you can reasonably sell without driving people to a competing product. Because of Microsoft's monopoly on the market, they can keep these prices higher because the barrier to entry for any competition is greater.
But anyhow, the cost of XP's actualy physical production and shipping is insigificant. What costs money for these products to be made is software developers and marketing. RedHat does some marketing, but it's all much lower cost and lower visibility advertising. RedHat pays only a small percentage of the cost of the development of Linux, funding a few key developers, and people to package and test their distro.
So really XP should cost a whole lot more. The fact that Linux still has trouble making headway despite it's substantially lower cost is indicative of the problem with the market.
In reading your comment, something occurred to me.
The only live capable game I have at the moment is Mech Assault, which is a great game, but I was hoping for a couple more play modes, including Co-Op.
One of the most popular FPS shooters is still Half Life because of the Counterstrike mod. Gamers took a basic game and changed it completely to become the kind of game that they wanted. With an XBox, this isn't going to happen because Microsoft has to keep tight control over the game licensing. If they don't they can't make back all the money they lose on selling the boxes. Furthermore, to even begin writing games you have to buy their SDK which is very expensive for an amateur developer.
This was one of the promises of the Indrema game console that was making me really look forward to its release which will now never happen.
This dimension has been around for quite a while. Most FPS and RTS games include some form of voice communication these days.
I've found that if you have a good crew of players on a server it can really add to the community feel of the game. On the other hand, it makes it really easy for one person to be an annoying pain. Nothing more fun annoying than logging on for a little saturday night mayhem to realize that there's a couple stone/drunk people on the server making a racket.
The one thing I've been dissapointed with when it comes to voice chat systems is that they never seem to get used to their potential. Especially in the more realistic FPS games (counterstrike, tom clancy games, etc), it could be really cool to be doing coordinated tactics with the voice communications. Unfortunately it seems that only a few people really take it to that level.
What will be interesting to see with Xbox live though is how the groups are managed on their servers. With a PC game, the host is usually just another PC owner, or some group run server. Good server operators will keep cheaters and other irritants off the server. I'm curious to see how this will play out with XBox live since, AFAIK, Microsoft is doing all the hosting.
What happens is that they make a bunch of layoffs and in the short run their productivity goes up because the same amount of work is being done by less people. While that is true, this is a temporary phenomenon. What ends up happening is that people, who are now overworked, begin looking for other opportunities. In a tight market these may be hard to find, but they'll begin to trickle in.
Companies who don't overwork their employees in this manner will find that it's easier for them to find top notch talent as people seek to jump ship from companies that do overwork them. The companies who do overwork their employees discover in the meantime that they have a number of key defections and that these people end up being replaced by less qualified people, becuase the best people won't put up with them. So they go out and hire more people because the less qualified people can't do the job as effectively as one qualified person.
So, they eventually end up with a large work force, some of whom have, in the mean time, become quite good at their jobs. Then they realize that they've now got all this dead weight again. Layoffs happen.
Wash. Rinse. Repeat.
Smart companies show their employees some loyalty in the bad times because it will be reciprocated in the good times. This leads to an overall more qualified and stable staff. That leads to increased productivity in the long run.
or so my theory goes...
I love evolution, but Bayesian filtering seems like such a great answer to the spam problem that I'm willing to toss Evolution out in favor of Mozilla (even though I find that in most respects Evolution is a superior mail client).
I use spamassassin right now and it works pretty well, but it does tend to give false positives with enough frequency that I have to still pay occasional attention to the spam. It makes it easier to quickly sort through the junk, but the spam is still wasting my time because of it.
Fine, yes, the movie leaked. So, the question that needs to be asked here is this: does the move studio lose money from this action?
I tend to believe that the loss of money is negligible. How many people are honestly going to spend the hours or days it will take to download the complete film? Now, out of those people, how many are going to watch it on their computer and then not bother to go to the theater or purchase it later on DVD. Finally, out of those who do this, how many would have gone and paid for a ticket or bought the DVD had this movie not been available on-line. I'm confident that this is a pretty insignificant percentage of movie viewers.
If they aren't losing money and those "pirating" the movie aren't making money, then why do the studios need protection? Copyright law is intended to protect their ability to exclusively profit from their work, and that is indeed happening. So, screw the studios, they've got all the legal tools they need to legitimately defend their copyright as it now stands. So let's just leave it at that and move on.
These corporations seem to be of the mistaken opinion that they can make a decision like this without repercussions. There logic is probably that if they, Sony, Vivendi, and Time Warner, all decide to just put their foot down and tell customers to shove it, there will be nothing we can do.
Even assuming that all of them do agree to do this, and that somehow, they aren't prosecuted for illegal collusion for this seemingly coordinated assault, the only people that are going to suffer for this is the labels and the artists who sign with them. People will just stop buying CD's if they won't work in their players. Class action lawsuits will happen because the media industry is releasing intentionally deffective products.
My expectation is that over the coming years their sales will continue to drop because nobody wants to buy a deffective product. People who have, for ethical reasons, decided to go out and actually buy CD's will see no reason to do so going forward. They'll try to pass a bunch of new laws to save themselves from the beast they've unleashed, and though some may pass, eventually through citizen outrage these new laws are going to get shut down.
So, BMG, and EMI, I say fuck you and the horse you rode in on. I don't need your music, I've got local bands, freely distrubted independent artists online, and intelligently run on-line music services like E-music. You will not see one more dime of my hard earned money in this lifetime.
There is no such thing as a crypto key that is impossibile to crack. What it comes down to is how improbably it is to crack it. In this example, it took 10,000 computers 549 days to crack it and it's only 109 bits. At 163 bits, that's a doubling in difficulty for ever additional bit.
Just add a bit, and suddenly you've pushed off the efficiencies gained by moore's law for another 18 months. By going to 163 bits, you've got a good 80 years before the that key can be broken in the same time as this 109 bit key. Frankly I wouldn't be too worried about that problem.
As long as your crypto is good enough to make it too expensive to crack for those who might want to crack it, you've got no worries. And I don't see a lot of people out there able to throw together the 10K computers to crack a key who also don't mind wasting almost two years on the effort.
Blogs... Instant messaging... Have you seen how much of on-line interaction these days circles around things that require substantial text input to use. Sure, I might occasionally just go out and surf, but is anybody really willing to go and blow another $1000 on computer equipment to do that?
The funny thing is that the people who are most likely to be willing to blow $1000 on a whiz bang gadget are the ones least likely to find a tablet PC useful. Tech savvy consumers, are the ones who are more likely to be blogging and IM'ing people which would be a pain in the butt to do with a tablet PC.
Furthermore, if I want to surf while sitting on the couch, a laptop is an excellent form factor frankly. I tried using a tablet (yes, I have one) on the couch and it's a pain because I have to prop it up somehow so that I can read it. This means sitting at strange angles and I can't shift around very much. On the other hand, a laptop, I just plop it on my lap, flip up the screen and I can sit anyway I want.
Except for a few limited fields, tablet PC's are really not ideal. They are well suited to any field where you need some portability, and expect to be doing more data viewing than entry. The field that is most obviously well suited to this is the medical field. There you have X-rays, tests, etc, that can all be loaded from a central server and you only need to make small annotations. You need some portability, but not much.
The problem is that not many fields really fit that bill. You usually want either total portability or very limited portability (thus making the laptop or PDA a good choice). Furthermore you sacrifice a lot of your ability to do data entry on a tablet PC with only a limited gain in portability. A well designed PDA is actually far superior for data entry because I can use a thumb keyboard and enter data quickly. A tablet requires one hand to hold the thing, and then the other to do data entry.
I've used them and I've found that, for the most part, they are solving a problem that I've never had. I suspect that it's a problem very few people have, so except in a few niche fields tablets aren't going to be a big thing. So buhbye transmeta.
Microsoft has a history of making settlements like this and then doing everything that can to weasel out of it. So I'm wondering if this agreement is really going to set up a framework that effectively keeps Microsoft in check. Even if the framework does support this, do you believe the justice department will be aggressive enough with its enforcement to take advantage of it?
Microsoft seems to be playing the part of the spoiled child here. The parents keep saying he's doing bad things and that he should stop, but they never back up their threats with effective action. I can't imagine Microsoft changing its ways anytime soon unless this agreement is actually setting up significant consequences for them.
People once dumped their inexpensive Apple II's, Commodores and TRS-80's for the more expensive IBM PC. The possiblity certainly exists that Mac OSX could take off in a big way, particularly since it is both easier to use than Windows, and more powerful.
.Net software figuring they can run it on mono and then discover that a new Microsoft API is available that's only available under windows because the new API's got a number of patents and royalty fees associated with it?
People dumped their inexpensive Apple II's and Commodores and TRS-80's because they all used IBM PC's at work and it made more sense to have the same machine at home as they had at work. Eventually the market share of these machines lead to the vast majority of software being developed for them and so they came to take over the market.
Linux distros are merely repackagers of software, slapping a user "friendly" veneers over it. There's nothing stopping a third party from slapping a better veneer over FreeBSD or NetBSD. This is what Apple did, and they're doing great because of it.
Doing great? In Q1 of 2002, Apple's market share for new computer sales was less than 3% of the market. That has been the case since at least 1999, regardless of OS X. They are hanging on to what they've got, but there's little evidence that they are going to be making any serious head way anytime soon.
I learned the painful lesson of the network effect back in the days of Atari. I an Atari 1040ST computer, and it was superior in every way to an IBM PC except for one REALLY important way. There were more IBM PC's out there. So, support for software dwindled, and my computer became worthless before it's time.
Linux becomes a viable option because it has a strong community of people around it developing for it. So even though there's not as much support amongst commercial vendors, one can accomplish a lot on Linux without them. So Linux isn't as hurt by the network effect as Apple is (especially because Linux runs on the same hardware as Windows).
But in order for linux to have real success going against Microsoft going forward, one of two things must happen. Either the nature of the computer marketplace has to change drastically or Linux has to be able to act as a drop-in replacement for Windows in existing networks. The first option is a possibility, no argument, but increasingly the second path is becoming very difficult.
What do the Samba people do when they can't implement Microsoft protocols? Do they start offering a closed source royalty laden version? I mean who would buy it when they can get that "free" from Microsoft. What happens when the people start writing
I'm not saying that somebody overthrowing Microsoft is impossible, but Linux is the best threat now. I think that this court case, had it ended in a better way, had a chance of helping out that cause. Linux may still do it on its own, but it's going to be a lot harder.
The point of this agreement is to, through court action, create genuine competition in the marketplace. The agreement falls short of this. Yes, people may choose to use Free software for whatever reasons, but if Free software is the only thing that's got a chance at competing, the agrement should address that. It doesn't, and that's what I'm saying.
Should any company have to give out such information such that it can be used in free software? No. But, this is a monopoly, and the rules change drasitcally when you are dealing with a monopoly.
the only other thing of interest was that they are supposed to open up any communication protocol that is needed in windows (SMB for instance).
Yup, but it won't help Samba. Microsoft is allowed to charge fair and non-discriminatory royalties for the information. They can also restrict the ability of 3rd parties to re-distribute and sub-license the information.
Ultimately the only serious competition Microsoft faces at this time is from Linux. Thus anything in this settlement that helps or hinders Linux is what's going to make a real difference in competition. Reading through the settlement, Linux cannot take advantage of any of this.
To summarize, there are several clauses about opening up the API's and protocols. This openess must be provided to OEM's, etc, on a "reasonable and non-discriminatory basis". This "reasonable and non-discrimantor" rule allows for charging of royalties and restricting distribution and sub-licensing of the intellectual property. So even if they provide this information at no cost or minimal cost they can make it impossible for any such information to every make it into GPL software.
So folks, I hope you enjoyed have your tax dollars flushed down a toilet.
Welcome to the future of transnational corporate governance ladies and gentlemen. Organizations get set up that are effectively untouchable by any national government, and are unbeholden to passe concepts like democratic representation. I mean right now this organization can pretty much do whatever it wants as long as they don't go far enough to drive all the network administrators in the world to start using a different root name server. And that, my friends, would be pretty damn far.
I read the middleware company's conclusions and was sad to see that Java lost. It looked like everything was pretty legit (certainly more so than some past endeavors like this). But then I read the article refuting it. It seems that there's a substantial amount of optimizations that were not done on the J2EE code that could have had a huge impact.
Basically when you get down to it, this is an impossible comparison to make. The architectures are different, the app servers are different, and the people writing the code are different. Trying to yield objective results out of such subjective measurements is impossible.
Just remember, if it's a big corporation, default to hating it. Just makes life much easier. For example:
your friend: Did you hear that big corporation X is polluting the environment, killing babies, supporting Al Qaeda, and paying third world labor in lint balls?
your reaction: Eh, I already hated them
Then you can go about your day unphased by their crimes. Much easier that way.
1) United Linux will have to release some feature complete and bug tested because otherwise they won't be able to compete against RedHat.
2) I didn't say "develop from scratch"
I would have said, "United Linux itself doesn't interest me that much, but at least it's better than using any Microsoft product" :)