This group could have taken a commanding role in privacy and users rights issues long ago, but instead it simply turned out to be a corporate mouthpiece.
Take a look at what it means for a site to be "Truste compliant" and you'll quickly see how worthless Truste is. To summarise - they don't care what your policy is as long as you state it publically. Well golly, I feel better already.
So why aren't you switching? Rates go up as the number of practitioners in the field drops - usually as a result of reduced demand. The last man standing in the C++ practioner market will be a happy camper, but this doesn't indicate a success for the language.
I think people are generally wise to be jaded about security in current MS products, but this company has demonstrated over the years that they will go into overkill mode on issues that appear to have a profound affect on the share price.
I would look for MS to make at least two major acquisitions in order to shore up their security offerings - they have used acquisitions in the past to shore up problem areas.
Of course the caveat is that they are not so much concerned with security as an intrinsic value but in the selling of security, and there is an important distinction here. As with any growing software market, you can't underestiamte Microsoft's efforts, and I think it is largely naive for the readership here to snicker and write off MS in this regard.
Why is this story new and interesting just because it takes place at an HP plant?
Its unskilled labor. You get what the state mandates you should get because there are one thousand people who would take that job for a nickel an hour less if the state permitted it.
If you don't like it, get a skill. This is not news.
Also don't assume that employees are more in the know at these places than the press - I've learned much to the contrary at a major competitor.
So that's why I say AOL won the influence game.
Well arguably it was never up for debate - they were the merger, not the mergee, and case has held the ostensible top position all this time. Nonetheless, he was smart enough to see over time that TW was in fact more valuable than his own operation.
Don't worry about TW's influence on the AOL side. There isn't any. Steve Case and Bob Pittman run the show.
You are fantastically mistaken. The reason Parsons was given Levin's job instead of Pittman is precisely because the AOL side of the business is now being reevaluted and reconsidered on the bottom line. Simply put - TW is contributing more to the bottom line than AOL. Much of the hype of technology/content integration hasn't panned out and now they are looking for a no-nonsense executive who will push the intellectual property of the company (Harry Potter, LOTR) over online access, as they see more money coming from this.
Pittman has in essence been downgraded at AOL/TW, for exactly the opposite reasons you think he is in ascendancy.
Its trite new-economy dogma to say that "the company is the employees", but the sad fact is that large-scale corporate development is all about factoring out individual employees. How many people are absolutely indispensible at AOL/TW? Probably less then five. Everyone else can be switched out at almost any time. Red Hat will be the same.
They have market share, they have revenues, they have contracts. These all exist outside of the contributions and dependencies of individual employees.
You mean other than supporting all of the peripherals you might want to buy, or running the other 99% of the software out there that isn't available for linux?
Netscape did loose 80% of their market share. I guess someone could argue that was because of a little problem with IE not going away, but I won't. As with other programs, high market share doesn't meant that it's the best thing under the sun.
WMA is taking off? Gee, I wonder why?
Look, I'm not telling you why or how Microsoft came to this state, I'm just putting down the numbers for you. If you want to rehash the Microsoft is evil argument, its been done better by others, so save it.
MSNBC and CNN are rolling in it.
Let me tell you a little clue about 24 hour news networks - unless there is a crisis going on, they are by no means "rolling in it". Prior to 9/11, CNN was bleeding money, badly. Once things settle down, they will go back to bleeding money. Don't believe me - check AOL/TW financials.
Step outside your perspective and you'll see a nation of $35k earners who are religious WalMart shoppers. Why? Because its almost always the cheapest place to buy things. The stores are dumpy and the clientele dishevelled, but if were about something other than saving money, Amazon and Walmart would have changed places a long time ago.
It will only take one well-placed cover story in Time or Newsweek to blow the cover off of the ongoing scam that is web auctions, and with the number of Americans testing the waters of these services, its going to happen soon.
As is obvious now, more often than not, unsuspecting consumers will end up paying more than retail for a used product. Who knows, maybe they are paying a premium for the excitement of bidding...but thats a stretch. More likely they simply aren't aware that the product is available for less, brand new.
Also, many sellers are no longer individuals or hobbyists, but professional middle men. I personally know of people who buy in bulk at Fry's and then move the merchandies on EBay, once again, for a profit. This trend has taken the fun out of web auctions and has turned it into a volume operation.
As far as Netscape not capitolizing on the traffic their portal generated; they did make some pretty nice ad revenue from it,
Wrong. That page was a bust from day one right through the dismal "portal for business" advertising campaign.
Netscape could have been Yahoo if they had done something with this page, but they dropped the ball big time.The points about buying the eyeballs of everyone who didn't change their default homepage (~90%+ of all users), and of getting a leverage point against MSFT are right on.
Except the notion of dollars following eyeballs has been completely debunked and is now part of the sad folklore of the.com era. If Yahoo is losing money on 1.5 billion hits a day, there is no way you can defend this notion.
There is no way for AOL to destroy the modular design of Linux/GNU software.
Famous Last Words, part 1.
My mom is a good example. She has used her computers for three application and only three applications. She has used AOL, Word Perfect, and Quicken. I'm not sure she uses Quicken any more. She uses AOL's instant messenger and email.
Pipe dream part 1. I don't buy this cheap market analysis, that there are these millions of people who want nothing from their computer but email and AOL. Peripheral support still matters. Plugins still matter. You can delude yourself into thinking that all of these users will have a useage profile that somehow prevents them from ever encountering any of linux's shortfalls on the desktop, but they will.
This could kill Microsoft.
Pipe dream part two. How many times has that been erroneously mentioned on this site?
Don't get too excited, AOL is still dependent on Microsoft and will be for some time to come.
Firstly, even the most clueless AOL users still use the web in general. I don't buy for a minute that they all stay firmly enclosed in AOL la-la land. In such a case, IE and plugins still matter.
Secondly, Microsoft is way ahead on device drivers. Users aren't going to be too happy when their new digital camera doesn't work with AOL-OS. There is more to a user enviroment than their online service. Unless AOL is able to make a substantial investment in device support, I don't see what there is to get excited about.
Its obvious that AOL/TW has no idea how to do enterprise computing, and for all of the tough talk about building an "AOL OS", they still rely on Microsoft for a great deal of their infrastructure.
If this happens, RH will simply get borged into a increasingly complicated conglomerate with no clear cohesive mission and declining financials.
AOL/TW has no idea what to do with an enterprise computing asset like RH. Look at what they did to iPlanet (now officially kaput).
On top of that, its not clear that RH needs to be bought. What are they missing? They seem to have decent capital available to them, and they are slowly cleaning up in the linux distro market. I would think IBM would be a better partner for them.
For the same reason AtHome bought Excite - because John Doerr told them to. Yes VCs have that much power. KPCB made huge investments in both Netscape and Excite, and once they saw their stock turning south, they simply employed other members of the KPCB "kieretsu" (sp?) to convert the shares into what was perceived to be more valuable assets.
KPCB has a long history of leveraging his full constellation of companies to maintain KPCB influence - and this is why he is often referred to as the most powerful man in Silicon Valley.
If you're sorting 5 items CPU matters more than anything, but if you're sorting 5000000000 items algorithm matters most.
And anyone with a brain breaks this over multiple systems, disks, and memory images. Yes, this is also a system problem.
Outside of supercomputing, very few people are throwing giant data sets at single logical systems, and even in supercomputing they are broken down substantially.
How does one decide when there is enough "software" in the world?
De facto platforms and standards are telling you this already. How many companies are selling word processors today? Spreadsheets? Databases?
The numbers in each of these markets is shrinking, not increasing.
The part of the market right now that is growing is middleware and enterprise logic coding, and I figure 80% of the people who program today make their money this way. Business will route around this cost base. Custom coding in the enterprise is the next sacred cow that will be automated. I won't budge on this, economies of scale are coming to enterprise middleware programming.
Well, I didn't claim that future coding tools would be graphical. "Paint by numbers" was a metaphor to describe the level of skill required.
Yes people will still have to think logically, I didn't claim otherwise. What I claimed and continue to claim is that the high-wage high-skill programmer of today will not be the person using these applications in 2015. A small number of them will be producing these tools, but the users of the tools will most definitely be lower pay overseas help or general business people.
Compare this to today, where almost all of the users of the most popular tool - the compiler - are almost all high pay programmers themselves.
You are similarly incorrect about your view that "our" programming jobs will be moving to China and India soon. Suffice to say that there are not a fixed number of programming jobs that must be divided like a pie among programmers. Rather, there is an almost infinite backlog of things that business and society would like automated and a limited number of programmers to do the automation.
It has nothing to do with a backlog of work, or elegance of code - it has everything to do with cost. The same arguments you make were made about the car industry - there is no way the Japanese could produce half the cars the US wants, right? Right?
Economies of scale are coming to programming because shareholders will demand it, it won't be a decision made by engineers.
The difference between P and NP is the difference between 3 hours and 30 years.
Stop while you're ahead. You've already demonstrated a pedestrian level knowledge of complexity analysis of real programs and you are only digging yourself deeper. Let me repeat it again - complexity analysis often hides giant performance gaps in constants, and the complexity of the solution often is only meaningful when n is large.
For most practical problems, P/NP is not a consideration in program design, as programs are likely more closely tied to system parameters (speed of disk, amount of memory) for performance than algorithmic complexity issues.
Slashdot Mirror
Take a look at what it means for a site to be "Truste compliant" and you'll quickly see how worthless Truste is. To summarise - they don't care what your policy is as long as you state it publically. Well golly, I feel better already.
So why aren't you switching? Rates go up as the number of practitioners in the field drops - usually as a result of reduced demand. The last man standing in the C++ practioner market will be a happy camper, but this doesn't indicate a success for the language.
You talk about that like its a good thing.
NASA should start on this task immediately.
I'm not knocking C or making a pro-Java argument, but the author simply can't seem to make a cogent argument. Here's a typical gem:
The answer is that although C++ is better than C, it's not that much better.
Oh, you don't say Steve! Gee, I guess you're right. Or how about:
So Java became a language in search of home and found in the web browser. But it's never been more than a cult language outside this market.
Thats right Steveo, people quit writing Java programs the second they found out applets sucked. Or maybe this bit of cluefulness:
Perl is slow, C is fast.
Finally, there are things you can do in C that you can't do in Perl. Remember the Perl interpreter is written in C.
Is this man writing for ten year olds?
If this is indicative of the quality of writing to be found in this magazine, we've got a new OSOpinion.com on our hands!
I would look for MS to make at least two major acquisitions in order to shore up their security offerings - they have used acquisitions in the past to shore up problem areas.
Of course the caveat is that they are not so much concerned with security as an intrinsic value but in the selling of security, and there is an important distinction here. As with any growing software market, you can't underestiamte Microsoft's efforts, and I think it is largely naive for the readership here to snicker and write off MS in this regard.
Can Microsoft claim that they already settled this suit? I'm not sure how the specifics reflect this, does anyone know the details?
Its unskilled labor. You get what the state mandates you should get because there are one thousand people who would take that job for a nickel an hour less if the state permitted it.
If you don't like it, get a skill. This is not news.
Who was explicitly put in charge over the AOLer.
Also don't assume that employees are more in the know at these places than the press - I've learned much to the contrary at a major competitor.
So that's why I say AOL won the influence game.
Well arguably it was never up for debate - they were the merger, not the mergee, and case has held the ostensible top position all this time. Nonetheless, he was smart enough to see over time that TW was in fact more valuable than his own operation.
You are fantastically mistaken. The reason Parsons was given Levin's job instead of Pittman is precisely because the AOL side of the business is now being reevaluted and reconsidered on the bottom line. Simply put - TW is contributing more to the bottom line than AOL. Much of the hype of technology/content integration hasn't panned out and now they are looking for a no-nonsense executive who will push the intellectual property of the company (Harry Potter, LOTR) over online access, as they see more money coming from this.
Pittman has in essence been downgraded at AOL/TW, for exactly the opposite reasons you think he is in ascendancy.
They have market share, they have revenues, they have contracts. These all exist outside of the contributions and dependencies of individual employees.
You mean other than supporting all of the peripherals you might want to buy, or running the other 99% of the software out there that isn't available for linux?
Netscape did loose 80% of their market share. I guess someone could argue that was because of a little problem with IE not going away, but I won't. As with other programs, high market share doesn't meant that it's the best thing under the sun.
WMA is taking off? Gee, I wonder why?
Look, I'm not telling you why or how Microsoft came to this state, I'm just putting down the numbers for you. If you want to rehash the Microsoft is evil argument, its been done better by others, so save it.
MSNBC and CNN are rolling in it.
Let me tell you a little clue about 24 hour news networks - unless there is a crisis going on, they are by no means "rolling in it". Prior to 9/11, CNN was bleeding money, badly. Once things settle down, they will go back to bleeding money. Don't believe me - check AOL/TW financials.
Step outside your perspective and you'll see a nation of $35k earners who are religious WalMart shoppers. Why? Because its almost always the cheapest place to buy things. The stores are dumpy and the clientele dishevelled, but if were about something other than saving money, Amazon and Walmart would have changed places a long time ago.
As is obvious now, more often than not, unsuspecting consumers will end up paying more than retail for a used product. Who knows, maybe they are paying a premium for the excitement of bidding...but thats a stretch. More likely they simply aren't aware that the product is available for less, brand new.
Also, many sellers are no longer individuals or hobbyists, but professional middle men. I personally know of people who buy in bulk at Fry's and then move the merchandies on EBay, once again, for a profit. This trend has taken the fun out of web auctions and has turned it into a volume operation.
Wrong. That page was a bust from day one right through the dismal "portal for business" advertising campaign.
Netscape could have been Yahoo if they had done something with this page, but they dropped the ball big time.The points about buying the eyeballs of everyone who didn't change their default homepage (~90%+ of all users), and of getting a leverage point against MSFT are right on.
Except the notion of dollars following eyeballs has been completely debunked and is now part of the sad folklore of the .com era. If Yahoo is losing money on 1.5 billion hits a day, there is no way you can defend this notion.
How? Demonstrate to me how owning Sports Illustrated magazine will increase the number of peripherals supported in linux.
Can they make linux that easy? Yes. Because they have the source code.
Well "they" in the collective sense have "had the source code" for ten years now and it hasn't happened yet - why would it happen now?
Windows = Linux
IE = Netscape
Windows Media Player = Winamp [no video, yet]
MSN = AOL
MSNBC = CNN
Lets correct these -
Linux + four years development and application support == Windows
Netscape + 80% market share lost == IE
WMP != Winamp because Winamp does not own its protocol, and like it or lump it, WMA is taking off.
MSN is still inferior to AOL, you're right there.
As for MSNBS and CNN, neither makes money, so who cares.
Famous Last Words, part 1.
My mom is a good example. She has used her computers for three application and only three applications. She has used AOL, Word Perfect, and Quicken. I'm not sure she uses Quicken any more. She uses AOL's instant messenger and email.
Pipe dream part 1. I don't buy this cheap market analysis, that there are these millions of people who want nothing from their computer but email and AOL. Peripheral support still matters. Plugins still matter. You can delude yourself into thinking that all of these users will have a useage profile that somehow prevents them from ever encountering any of linux's shortfalls on the desktop, but they will.
This could kill Microsoft.
Pipe dream part two. How many times has that been erroneously mentioned on this site?
Firstly, even the most clueless AOL users still use the web in general. I don't buy for a minute that they all stay firmly enclosed in AOL la-la land. In such a case, IE and plugins still matter.
Secondly, Microsoft is way ahead on device drivers. Users aren't going to be too happy when their new digital camera doesn't work with AOL-OS. There is more to a user enviroment than their online service. Unless AOL is able to make a substantial investment in device support, I don't see what there is to get excited about.
If this happens, RH will simply get borged into a increasingly complicated conglomerate with no clear cohesive mission and declining financials.
On top of that, its not clear that RH needs to be bought. What are they missing? They seem to have decent capital available to them, and they are slowly cleaning up in the linux distro market. I would think IBM would be a better partner for them.
KPCB has a long history of leveraging his full constellation of companies to maintain KPCB influence - and this is why he is often referred to as the most powerful man in Silicon Valley.
And anyone with a brain breaks this over multiple systems, disks, and memory images. Yes, this is also a system problem.
Outside of supercomputing, very few people are throwing giant data sets at single logical systems, and even in supercomputing they are broken down substantially.
De facto platforms and standards are telling you this already. How many companies are selling word processors today? Spreadsheets? Databases?
The numbers in each of these markets is shrinking, not increasing.
The part of the market right now that is growing is middleware and enterprise logic coding, and I figure 80% of the people who program today make their money this way. Business will route around this cost base. Custom coding in the enterprise is the next sacred cow that will be automated. I won't budge on this, economies of scale are coming to enterprise middleware programming.
Yes people will still have to think logically, I didn't claim otherwise. What I claimed and continue to claim is that the high-wage high-skill programmer of today will not be the person using these applications in 2015. A small number of them will be producing these tools, but the users of the tools will most definitely be lower pay overseas help or general business people.
Compare this to today, where almost all of the users of the most popular tool - the compiler - are almost all high pay programmers themselves.
You are similarly incorrect about your view that "our" programming jobs will be moving to China and India soon. Suffice to say that there are not a fixed number of programming jobs that must be divided like a pie among programmers. Rather, there is an almost infinite backlog of things that business and society would like automated and a limited number of programmers to do the automation.
It has nothing to do with a backlog of work, or elegance of code - it has everything to do with cost. The same arguments you make were made about the car industry - there is no way the Japanese could produce half the cars the US wants, right? Right?
Economies of scale are coming to programming because shareholders will demand it, it won't be a decision made by engineers.
Stop while you're ahead. You've already demonstrated a pedestrian level knowledge of complexity analysis of real programs and you are only digging yourself deeper. Let me repeat it again - complexity analysis often hides giant performance gaps in constants, and the complexity of the solution often is only meaningful when n is large.
For most practical problems, P/NP is not a consideration in program design, as programs are likely more closely tied to system parameters (speed of disk, amount of memory) for performance than algorithmic complexity issues.