don't care whether or not a company has innovated in the "here's something totally new that you've never seen before"
you may not care, but microsoft does. remember that recent interview where balmer said that linux was "not innovative" because it was just "a clone of unix"?
ms has set their own definition of innovation. and they aren't living up to it.
espite all of the jargon, when Nora Denzel was cornered and forced to respond intelligently
this is at the core of what's wrong with buzzwords. they start as meaningful and then get hijacked by the marketing department and media and are bled dry of all content.
witness "enterprise". back in the day of "client server" computing it was realized that there were environments that were so big that each server was the client of other servers and the peer to yet more. clusters of lans in wans that were themselves clustered. do describe the feudal structure that was built to accomodate this size and complexity of network, we came up with a word: enterprise.
of course, marketing realized that since enterprise-class products were the most expensive they should really work at making sure everybody felt they had to have them. a buzzword got born by the appropriation of a valid term and now i can buy an "enterprise desktop" solution for numerous products. "enterprise desktop"? what the hell is that? marketing, m'lad, marketing.
anyway. glad to see someone call the sales team on their buzzwordery. if we want to protect the meaning of our tech descriptions we'll have to fight the sales team for them - or stick to six-letter acronyms that they won't want (call the vpn the "iskampd" box fr instance)
yeah. that'll have a WHOLE LOTTA uses with a camera
one word: military.
now, i'm not saying that the dod is going to buy a bunch of these down at frys and ship 'em off to the overseas theatre d'jour - but this is exactly the kind of tech that the military will want to embrace and extend (and explode). put a camera and a bomb on this and you have the perfect tool for eliminating heavily unarmed and shoeless enemy combatants.
Now it is "+5 funny". I have no problem with it being "funny". I do have a problem with it being considered "informative",
the punch line is, obviously, the "bob" reference - and i freely admit that i know jack about win2k. i was informed by a "windows guy" (the sort who wears the ms golf shirt... you know them) that the afformentioned os was "built on vms". as for the "who boosted the gui from who argument" all i can say in defense was that apple got a two hour tour of xerox par, gave xerox a sweet stock deal in return and never made any secret of it's intentions that it was considering building a gui-driven os. ms got several prototype macs with strict nda's so they could build user apps and appeared with windows shortly thereafter.
if there is one company in the history of computing that has been truly innovative it hast to be... at&t. but if there are two, the other one is apple.
What does the Sun Desktop have which Mandrake doesn't (besides star office).
support: having worked in a solaris shop in the past, i know that when you finally lay down the bucks for support you get support. your machine craters so bad that stop-a does nothing? there will be a guy in a tweed jacket from sun at your door in 40 minutes. mandrake doesn't do that.
unified solution: the os is backed by sun, the hardware is backed by sun, the application is backed by sun. nothing sucks more than having an issue and hearing the vendor support staff blame each other for the failure. if something fails with this rig you make one call.
accountability: no one ever got fired for going with ibm. or sun. if something does fail dramatically and you have gone with a "best of breed" (perceived or real) then your boss will be disappointed in the vendor. if you go with a small "indie" vendor like mandrake, your ass is fired.
promise of permanence: will mandrake be around next year? if so, will they still be in a condition to honour their contracts? look at the stunt red hat just pulled - there are a lot of pissed off users out there and a lot of admins of small installations who have to explain to their bosses why the company now has to pony up $400 a seat or switch distros. with sun, the chinese feel confident that their vendor will still be around and still be honouring its contracts this time next year. and next year. and the year after.
don't get me wrong: i think mandrake make a fine product... but when you've got $50 million of yr boss' money to invest you don't put it on papa's moustache to win in the third. you buy a t-bill.
now all that is needed is the ibm buyout of novell and all the pieces are there:
an operating system: suse
a well-known networking interface: novell
a hardware vendor: gateway
clout and cred: ibm
it looks like a partnership is being built to offer the "whole enchilada" in the same way that sun does. if that's the case, then red hat's days are probably numbered.
well, at least in the preliminary stages it seems like a lot of the "standard" fedora packages are beta (translation: broken). don't trust me, read the osnews review. very enlightening.
It is illegal and damaging to use the civil court system to intimidate people
of course, the fear here is that subpeoning investors could be construed as "intimidating people" - ie, ibm intimidating current and potential investors in sco. really, who would want to invest serious coin in a company if they thought there was a good chance they'd get a subpeona from ibm?
tread carefully here, big blue. you could be handing a legitimate complaint to santa cruz![1]
If Novell is a tech graveyard, HP/ComDEC is equal to the Cambodian Killing Fields.
good lord. with red hat deep-sixing their standard version and now the threat of suse being captured by the khmer rouge,
what the hell am i going to install now???
bingo! the most probable unstated agenda here is that psu wants to avoid anything vaguely looking like liability here. the approximate $1 mil a year this would cost is a great way to say to the riaa hordes "don't blame us, we tried to dissuade our students from evil copyright theft - sue the students directly"
we had a war on drugs. there are still drugs.
we had a war on terrorism. didn't stop that either.
why should a war on spam fare any better?
the problem with all these wars is that they are supply-side. as long as there is a demand, there were will be a supplier. fine the suppliers, arrest the suppliers... hell, kill them even. but while there still exist the droves of doe-eyed sheep (mix those metaphors!) who are willing to buy "spam-vertized" goods and services, there will be spammers.
this arrest will in the long and medium term acheive nothing.
when i was in school i took some pr course where it was presented that a direct mail campaign (snail mail, addressed directly to the recipient) with a response rate of 3% was considered a "roaring success".
spam can survive even with miniscule response rates (one hundredths of a per cent) because the actual transmission is free. direct mail has postage and printing costs. telemarketing needs actual wage-earning callers and phone connections. but spam once you find that open relay, spam is free.
with costs like that, revenue can afford to be low.
maybe... but you might lose too. if ms can manage to leverage their desktop os monopoly to favour their music player to the exclusion of others your much-vaunted consumer-choice will actually be decreased.
name two web browsers with a market share greater than 1%.
Re:No one took your time in the first place.
on
Take Back Your Time!
·
· Score: 1
Boss: No, I'm going on a picnic with my family. You're working or you're fired.
Employee: What time?
Slashdot Mirror
you may not care, but microsoft does. remember that recent interview where balmer said that linux was "not innovative" because it was just "a clone of unix"?
ms has set their own definition of innovation. and they aren't living up to it.
too true. microsoft has talked a lot recently about how their committed to innovation. and yet, their two most recent releases:
this is at the core of what's wrong with buzzwords. they start as meaningful and then get hijacked by the marketing department and media and are bled dry of all content.
witness "enterprise". back in the day of "client server" computing it was realized that there were environments that were so big that each server was the client of other servers and the peer to yet more. clusters of lans in wans that were themselves clustered. do describe the feudal structure that was built to accomodate this size and complexity of network, we came up with a word: enterprise.
of course, marketing realized that since enterprise-class products were the most expensive they should really work at making sure everybody felt they had to have them. a buzzword got born by the appropriation of a valid term and now i can buy an "enterprise desktop" solution for numerous products. "enterprise desktop"? what the hell is that? marketing, m'lad, marketing.
anyway. glad to see someone call the sales team on their buzzwordery. if we want to protect the meaning of our tech descriptions we'll have to fight the sales team for them - or stick to six-letter acronyms that they won't want (call the vpn the "iskampd" box fr instance)
it's a small country...
one word: military.
now, i'm not saying that the dod is going to buy a bunch of these down at frys and ship 'em off to the overseas theatre d'jour - but this is exactly the kind of tech that the military will want to embrace and extend (and explode). put a camera and a bomb on this and you have the perfect tool for eliminating heavily unarmed and shoeless enemy combatants.
actually, given the track record of sendmail on the security front i think i'm just going to keep quiet about this one....
the punch line is, obviously, the "bob" reference - and i freely admit that i know jack about win2k. i was informed by a "windows guy" (the sort who wears the ms golf shirt... you know them) that the afformentioned os was "built on vms". as for the "who boosted the gui from who argument" all i can say in defense was that apple got a two hour tour of xerox par, gave xerox a sweet stock deal in return and never made any secret of it's intentions that it was considering building a gui-driven os. ms got several prototype macs with strict nda's so they could build user apps and appeared with windows shortly thereafter.
if there is one company in the history of computing that has been truly innovative it hast to be... at&t. but if there are two, the other one is apple.
moderator note: this post is painfully offtopic.
don't get me wrong: i think mandrake make a fine product... but when you've got $50 million of yr boss' money to invest you don't put it on papa's moustache to win in the third. you buy a t-bill.
thank you bill for pusing the envelope.
wrong. gates is smith! did you see the market share that guy had by the end of the series?
or better yet, halfbakery.com... home of ideas intentionally half-baked.
it looks like a partnership is being built to offer the "whole enchilada" in the same way that sun does. if that's the case, then red hat's days are probably numbered.
well, at least in the preliminary stages it seems like a lot of the "standard" fedora packages are beta (translation: broken). don't trust me, read the osnews review. very enlightening.
i can answer that one for you: to linuxiso.org to get a copy of debian or freebsd or gentoo or mandrake...
of course, the fear here is that subpeoning investors could be construed as "intimidating people" - ie, ibm intimidating current and potential investors in sco. really, who would want to invest serious coin in a company if they thought there was a good chance they'd get a subpeona from ibm?
tread carefully here, big blue. you could be handing a legitimate complaint to santa cruz![1]
1. sorry, "utah".
uh, that's why the parent post got +3 funny. irony, you know.
more importantly! if there weren't viruses, how many of us would be out of a job? now that's something to celebrate.
good lord. with red hat deep-sixing their standard version and now the threat of suse being captured by the khmer rouge, what the hell am i going to install now???
all of it! the day someone got the bright idea of frontloading the time-and-weather number with an ad, this was all ineveitable.
ah yes, "news for marketing professionals,"
if your focus group is slashdot you're in serious trouble, my lad.
bingo! the most probable unstated agenda here is that psu wants to avoid anything vaguely looking like liability here. the approximate $1 mil a year this would cost is a great way to say to the riaa hordes "don't blame us, we tried to dissuade our students from evil copyright theft - sue the students directly"
we had a war on drugs. there are still drugs. we had a war on terrorism. didn't stop that either. why should a war on spam fare any better?
the problem with all these wars is that they are supply-side. as long as there is a demand, there were will be a supplier. fine the suppliers, arrest the suppliers... hell, kill them even. but while there still exist the droves of doe-eyed sheep (mix those metaphors!) who are willing to buy "spam-vertized" goods and services, there will be spammers.
this arrest will in the long and medium term acheive nothing.
mind you, i'm switching to gentoo... so take what i say with a grain (block) of salt.
when i was in school i took some pr course where it was presented that a direct mail campaign (snail mail, addressed directly to the recipient) with a response rate of 3% was considered a "roaring success".
spam can survive even with miniscule response rates (one hundredths of a per cent) because the actual transmission is free. direct mail has postage and printing costs. telemarketing needs actual wage-earning callers and phone connections. but spam once you find that open relay, spam is free.
with costs like that, revenue can afford to be low.
maybe... but you might lose too. if ms can manage to leverage their desktop os monopoly to favour their music player to the exclusion of others your much-vaunted consumer-choice will actually be decreased.
name two web browsers with a market share greater than 1%.
Employee: What time?
perhaps a better response would be:
Employee: talk to my union rep.
rolls off the tongue nicely, doesn't it.