Unix functionality right there beside real support for multimedia, and real support for the important apps we inevitably use (Word, Excel) by virtue of everyone else using them.
This appears to be a phenomenal product. I am seriously considering ditching my windows and linux boxes both and moving to a Mac once this hits the shelves.
Its just seems that OSX is where Gnome and KDE want to get to, but will probably never arrive. While I believe in these open-source efforts, I can't be bothered to wait around for them anymore.
Linux supports Java, Flash, MP3, and MPEG. RealNetworks also has a client for Linux.
But linux support for the media devices themselves is still non-intuitive, and most of the plugins you describe have very weak support. The Flash and Real plugins are very poor, and I believe at least one major version behind.
I'm not saying it won't get there, but I'm sticking by my estimate that linux support for multimedia will continue to be at least two years behind.
Gnome is currently providing Win95 levels of functionality - actually, a more accurate statement would be somewhere between Win3.1 and Win95 - there are still critical features regarding drag and drop that Windows users have enjoyed for nearly five years that Gnome still does not support.
Now the issue is multimedia support - once again, Gnome will come up to speed somewhere in the two year lag range. Its interesting that I note that most uber-smart unix geeks I know are just throwing in the towel and running an SSH client from windows into their BSD boxes. Why? Because they're tired of seeing "plugin not suported" when they try to do anything interesting on the web.
The only sites out there that make explicit use of the meta tag are, well, explicit! Any metadata in a web page that is authored by a human is going to be subject to rampant spoofing. Presuming search engines actually indexed metadata in a strict way, you could simply contually redefine your keywords and subject matter to reflect whatever you thought was the hot topic of the day. Presuming sites were indexed rapidly, webmasters could simply watch the news and use popular keyphrases ("presidential inaguaration") to get their sites indexed as always being relevant.
This is why search engines that work off of metadata typically give you porn links for almost anything, and why Yahoo can't be spoofed (their surfers actually visit the site to see what its about).
Computers may be faster than we need them to be, but for the forseeable future, there isn't enough bandwidth to support the casual sharing of media among home users. For most Americans, they'll be lucky if they can get DSL/cable - some estimates put broadband in the home at 10% penetration at most. Even for the users who can get broadband at home, 1.5 mbps (the max offered by most vendors) isn't enough to support seamless file sharing without a noticeable drain on bandwidth.
Added to which, once we actually start paying for music downloads (its inevitable), there will be demand for reliable downloads. Hell, if I'm paying real money per song, timeouts and crappy connections are unacceptable. Once money enters into the equation, I want the media in a timely and efficient manner.
None of this matters in a future where everyone has fiber to the home, but we're at least fifteen years away from that being a reality for most citizens.
They hit $3, and are now holding at $2 for the past week or so
No, they are under two bucks and have been most of this week.
I have, smart ass... $20,000. I've averaged down since $15, now own 5,000 shares. Why don't you put your money where your mouth is, and sell some calls for BEOS? When Be goes above $5 (and is marginable again), will you short it? If not, why not? They are on their deathbed, after all...I shorted that toilet paper a long time ago, and I can tell that I made at least ten times as much riding Be into the ground as you will make propping it up.
1. The x86 market is so much bigger than the PPC market, it's scary. Be ported to this platform, while keeping PPC. A brilliant move, their number of users skyrocketed.
No one is doubting that more x86 chips are out there, but you are drawing a ridiculous conclusion regarding BeOS use from this. You need to come clean about the userbase for the BeOS...its probably in the NetBSD range. OpenBSD and Solaris x86 have larger userbases.
Be has now shifted to a market where they can be hugely successful: IA's. They've already started showing off some of their new partners.
There is no market there - vendors have been showing off appliance devices for four years - its still a useless gimmick forgotten shortly after Comdex.
Once again, if you really believe Be will be succesful, you can purchase a substantial part of the company when the market opens in the morning. What are you waiting for?
You have some valid arguments why Intel will ultimately crush Apple, I don't think anyone is doubting that. Nonetheless, it would be silly to pursue this reasoning to substantiate your claim that Be is better off not being part of Apple.
Apple's stock had an impressive run up in the last eighteen months (before the drop), and Be employees could have made some significant cash during that time. As it stands now, their Be stock is toilet paper.
You might think you've made yourself look quite insightful with your contrary hooey, but the internet appliance market is still nascent, and is potentially empty. The more people try to obsolete the PC, the more it becomes the center of the electronic home. Face it, a generalized computing device with lots of hardware, loadable software, and a complex OS is going to be part of computing in the home and business for at least the next twenty years.
Be, on the other hand, is on its deathbed. Worth a paltry $70 million dollars, Be is very near being delisted and will likely be delisted ion the next twelve months given the current trend in its stock. They're so succesful they can hardly stay in business. Given their brutalized finances and grim outlook, I can't figure out at all how you came to your absurd conclusions, but why not put your money where your mouth is and make a substantial investment in Be? Seriously, with a sizeable loan, you could end up owning a substantial part of the company. If Be is going to be the next Microsoft, you could easily turn $10 million now into $20 billion...but something tells me you know deep down that you are full of shit.
My favorite Einstein book is (barnes and noble link) Einstein for Beginners, from the quite excellent "Beginners" series you have probably seen in the philosophy or science racks at the bookstore.
This book makes no assumptions about your physics acumen, and the explanation of relativity is one of the best I have read - it is accessible to almost anyone with a high-school level education.
And speaking of search engines, long ago CMGI also bought the pioneering Lycos and took it public, making tons of money for still more geeks. They took an underperforming asset and polished it into something valuable, and geeks benefited.
CMGI at one point owned a fair portion of Lycos stock, but they never "owned" the company. As for "underperforming", at the time CMGI took stock in Lycos and Yahoo, both were doubling page views every month. How do you get "underperforming" out of that? And let me assure you that the yprovided absolutely no management guidance to Yahoo. They simply bought the stock when it was low and sold it when it was high.
I wouldn't get too worried about this development. CMGI, IdeaLab, ICG, etc. are all on the ropes. There business models were predicated on the notion that the market can absorb vast numbers of new businesses being hatched every month. We now know this is unrealistic.
None of these holding companies has a single offering that the larger market is interested in. Outside of Alta Vista, CMGI doesn't have one product of interest. These holding companies are fading fast.
CMGI's entire business model has fallen apart...well in fact, they never really had one. CMGI's entire business strategy was predicated on two early investments: Yahoo and Lycos. After these paid out, CMGI had nothing to bank on.
Alta Vista is never going public - I think Wetherell accepts this now, so he is looking for alternate revenues from this product. Look to see more suspicious revenue models from CMGI - most of their other incubated companies are dead or very near dead, and CMGI itself is in very serious trouble.
Lets see, when we deregulate demand for power by letting prices fluctuate, but keep the supply of power fixed, I wonder what direction those prices will go?
Some basic economics at work in California right now, and no one wants to come clean and admit that they fudged royally by not bringing excess capactiy online before deregulating prices.
Forget all this "cartel" shit being tossed about - power companies are just following the price up the supply curve, just as the regulators allowed them to do.
What really happened in California was deregulation of demand, but no deregulation of supply. Prices were allowed to fluctuate, but you still couldn't bring new plants online.
Amazingly, even in the midst of this crisis, they are blocking the proposed power generation center south of San Jose (right where it is neede most) because of environmental concerns. Yup, thats right kids, even as we speak it is as impossible as ever to build new generators in California. Out-of-state suppliers are licking their chops - they've got at least three or four more years of gouging to do before the citizens of California become incensed and turn their wrath on environmental groups. Its too bad - I generally consider myself an environmentalist, but in this case they're building up some negative karma with the general public that will take a decade or more to repair.
Do we really need another technical publisher? For any topic I can think of, there are at least three different publishers putting books out on that topic, and this applies to even some obscure subject matter.
With Manning, Addison-Wesley, Prentice-Hall,, O'Reilly, etc. out there as well as the growing corpus of web-only/online documentation, you probably have zero chance creating yet another venue for technical material.
AMD's primary concern is propping up their stock price, which like Intel's has been hammered. I don't think AMD is particularly concerned about the purpose to which their processors are put, and in any case you haven't made any useful argument why the rackmount market is not tangible, viable, and/or poised for growth (hint - its all of the above).
They don't need to build a full-blown SAX parser into the phone, they only need to be able to parse SyncML. This parser could easily be put into programmable logic so it could be upgraded later.
At least he went out while HP is still at least a shadow of its former self.
Things are looking good for the valley dinosaur known as HP. Carly is quickly running it into the ground. Cheap Taiwanese printers are $39 at the grocery store (and don't bring up the "lose on the printer to sell them the cartridges" crap - you can't support a company like HP on ink cartridges, which coincidentally are also dropping in price nearly as fast as printers). Superdome is a dud. HPUX is on its way out. HP's gambit on Itanium was disastrous (as it was for Intel). The PWC debacle as well as the earnings miss have ravaged the stock.
This is a company in serious trouble. Thankfully the founders did not live to see it end up like SGI.
I see your point, but semantics are never enforceable anyway. At the end of the day, if people want to take your document and completely invert your semantics, they are going to do it.
Added to which, you haven't told me how RDF gets around this, or are you saying that the issue should be avoided altogether?
As for your issues with the merger, I don't understand your point - Linuxcare is doomed unless someone acquires them. This company has been in serious trouble for over a year - would you prefer they stay independent and fold?
Secondly, its an easy conclusion that most of the distros will fold. The value add of 90% of the distros out there is negligable at best, and by no means can one forge a succesful business out of downloading RH and pasting their own logo on it.
A schema isn't a means of publishing your data to a wider audience, it's a means of locking-out everyone who doesn't have a copy of it.
Are you telling me that someone who doesn't have my data doesn't have it? Your astounding conclusion seems to be some sort of convoluted identity function.
Look at real user of RDF for how to do this in a better way. XML is great, but the coupling between structure and semantics that comes
from using an XML schema to represent both is a nightmare for interworking between teams that overlap, but aren't identical enough to
use exactly the same schema.
No one is doubting that poorly implemented schemas will degrade productivity, but I don't see how a dead, unused (sorry, never was used, ever) standard like RDF is going to help. Added to which you can employ namespaces to form compound documents from many schemas, so your limitation doesn't exist in any case.
A couple of years ago, we watched a bunch of old guys slaving over COBOL legacy conversion programs, desperately trying to suck the
data out and into SQL, before Cinderella's glass computer turned back into the Y2K pumpkin. I don't want my future to turn into the same
thing, scratching together n^2 XSL transforms to convert fooML into foo'ML.
You're vastly overestimating the dynamic nature of these schemas - this isn't the HTML DTD we're talking about. Look at DocBook, as an example - people have been able to use it for years without concern that the next revision would destroy their document semantics. Once again proof that a properly designed format weakens your counterarguments, and in any case, RDF isn't going to ever, EVER take off, so its probably time to quit flogging it.
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This appears to be a phenomenal product. I am seriously considering ditching my windows and linux boxes both and moving to a Mac once this hits the shelves.
Its just seems that OSX is where Gnome and KDE want to get to, but will probably never arrive. While I believe in these open-source efforts, I can't be bothered to wait around for them anymore.
But linux support for the media devices themselves is still non-intuitive, and most of the plugins you describe have very weak support. The Flash and Real plugins are very poor, and I believe at least one major version behind.
I'm not saying it won't get there, but I'm sticking by my estimate that linux support for multimedia will continue to be at least two years behind.
Now the issue is multimedia support - once again, Gnome will come up to speed somewhere in the two year lag range. Its interesting that I note that most uber-smart unix geeks I know are just throwing in the towel and running an SSH client from windows into their BSD boxes. Why? Because they're tired of seeing "plugin not suported" when they try to do anything interesting on the web.
This is why search engines that work off of metadata typically give you porn links for almost anything, and why Yahoo can't be spoofed (their surfers actually visit the site to see what its about).
Added to which, once we actually start paying for music downloads (its inevitable), there will be demand for reliable downloads. Hell, if I'm paying real money per song, timeouts and crappy connections are unacceptable. Once money enters into the equation, I want the media in a timely and efficient manner.
None of this matters in a future where everyone has fiber to the home, but we're at least fifteen years away from that being a reality for most citizens.
And the chances that it will go to zero are infinitely higher than it going anywhere near the positive territory needed to get you rich.
I'm out of my short position on BEOS as I've already said - I don't need to make any more money than I already have riding it down.
Thats tough talk from a guy whose investment is in the shitter.
Your "long haul" investment is BEOS? Congrats, you are the worst investor of all time. Try the S&P500.
No, they are under two bucks and have been most of this week.
I have, smart ass... $20,000. I've averaged down since $15, now own 5,000 shares. Why don't you put your money where your mouth is, and sell some calls for BEOS? When Be goes above $5 (and is marginable again), will you short it? If not, why not? They are on their deathbed, after all...I shorted that toilet paper a long time ago, and I can tell that I made at least ten times as much riding Be into the ground as you will make propping it up.
Enjoy!
No one is doubting that more x86 chips are out there, but you are drawing a ridiculous conclusion regarding BeOS use from this. You need to come clean about the userbase for the BeOS...its probably in the NetBSD range. OpenBSD and Solaris x86 have larger userbases.
Be has now shifted to a market where they can be hugely successful: IA's. They've already started showing off some of their new partners.
There is no market there - vendors have been showing off appliance devices for four years - its still a useless gimmick forgotten shortly after Comdex.
Once again, if you really believe Be will be succesful, you can purchase a substantial part of the company when the market opens in the morning. What are you waiting for?
Apple's stock had an impressive run up in the last eighteen months (before the drop), and Be employees could have made some significant cash during that time. As it stands now, their Be stock is toilet paper.
Be, on the other hand, is on its deathbed. Worth a paltry $70 million dollars, Be is very near being delisted and will likely be delisted ion the next twelve months given the current trend in its stock. They're so succesful they can hardly stay in business. Given their brutalized finances and grim outlook, I can't figure out at all how you came to your absurd conclusions, but why not put your money where your mouth is and make a substantial investment in Be? Seriously, with a sizeable loan, you could end up owning a substantial part of the company. If Be is going to be the next Microsoft, you could easily turn $10 million now into $20 billion...but something tells me you know deep down that you are full of shit.
This book makes no assumptions about your physics acumen, and the explanation of relativity is one of the best I have read - it is accessible to almost anyone with a high-school level education.
CMGI at one point owned a fair portion of Lycos stock, but they never "owned" the company. As for "underperforming", at the time CMGI took stock in Lycos and Yahoo, both were doubling page views every month. How do you get "underperforming" out of that? And let me assure you that the yprovided absolutely no management guidance to Yahoo. They simply bought the stock when it was low and sold it when it was high.
None of these holding companies has a single offering that the larger market is interested in. Outside of Alta Vista, CMGI doesn't have one product of interest. These holding companies are fading fast.
Alta Vista is never going public - I think Wetherell accepts this now, so he is looking for alternate revenues from this product. Look to see more suspicious revenue models from CMGI - most of their other incubated companies are dead or very near dead, and CMGI itself is in very serious trouble.
Some basic economics at work in California right now, and no one wants to come clean and admit that they fudged royally by not bringing excess capactiy online before deregulating prices.
Forget all this "cartel" shit being tossed about - power companies are just following the price up the supply curve, just as the regulators allowed them to do.
Amazingly, even in the midst of this crisis, they are blocking the proposed power generation center south of San Jose (right where it is neede most) because of environmental concerns. Yup, thats right kids, even as we speak it is as impossible as ever to build new generators in California. Out-of-state suppliers are licking their chops - they've got at least three or four more years of gouging to do before the citizens of California become incensed and turn their wrath on environmental groups. Its too bad - I generally consider myself an environmentalist, but in this case they're building up some negative karma with the general public that will take a decade or more to repair.
With Manning, Addison-Wesley, Prentice-Hall,, O'Reilly, etc. out there as well as the growing corpus of web-only/online documentation, you probably have zero chance creating yet another venue for technical material.
AMD's primary concern is propping up their stock price, which like Intel's has been hammered. I don't think AMD is particularly concerned about the purpose to which their processors are put, and in any case you haven't made any useful argument why the rackmount market is not tangible, viable, and/or poised for growth (hint - its all of the above).
They don't need to build a full-blown SAX parser into the phone, they only need to be able to parse SyncML. This parser could easily be put into programmable logic so it could be upgraded later.
Things are looking good for the valley dinosaur known as HP. Carly is quickly running it into the ground. Cheap Taiwanese printers are $39 at the grocery store (and don't bring up the "lose on the printer to sell them the cartridges" crap - you can't support a company like HP on ink cartridges, which coincidentally are also dropping in price nearly as fast as printers). Superdome is a dud. HPUX is on its way out. HP's gambit on Itanium was disastrous (as it was for Intel). The PWC debacle as well as the earnings miss have ravaged the stock.
This is a company in serious trouble. Thankfully the founders did not live to see it end up like SGI.
Added to which, you haven't told me how RDF gets around this, or are you saying that the issue should be avoided altogether?
Secondly, its an easy conclusion that most of the distros will fold. The value add of 90% of the distros out there is negligable at best, and by no means can one forge a succesful business out of downloading RH and pasting their own logo on it.
Are you telling me that someone who doesn't have my data doesn't have it? Your astounding conclusion seems to be some sort of convoluted identity function.
Look at real user of RDF for how to do this in a better way. XML is great, but the coupling between structure and semantics that comes from using an XML schema to represent both is a nightmare for interworking between teams that overlap, but aren't identical enough to use exactly the same schema.
No one is doubting that poorly implemented schemas will degrade productivity, but I don't see how a dead, unused (sorry, never was used, ever) standard like RDF is going to help. Added to which you can employ namespaces to form compound documents from many schemas, so your limitation doesn't exist in any case.
A couple of years ago, we watched a bunch of old guys slaving over COBOL legacy conversion programs, desperately trying to suck the data out and into SQL, before Cinderella's glass computer turned back into the Y2K pumpkin. I don't want my future to turn into the same thing, scratching together n^2 XSL transforms to convert fooML into foo'ML.
You're vastly overestimating the dynamic nature of these schemas - this isn't the HTML DTD we're talking about. Look at DocBook, as an example - people have been able to use it for years without concern that the next revision would destroy their document semantics. Once again proof that a properly designed format weakens your counterarguments, and in any case, RDF isn't going to ever, EVER take off, so its probably time to quit flogging it.