So the solution for MS is to downplay that advantage and try to turn it into a disadvantage, at least in the eyes of people who see their advertisements.
Note that's it's pretty much forbidden in advertising to admit your competitor has any advantages whatsoever, unless those advantages are widely accepted by the audience.
Which means that advantages of Open Source Software must be pretty well understood in Germany, otherwise MS's ironic FUDing of those advantages into a disavantage wouldn't have much affect. I can't see them running an ad in the US like that (where there really isn't a wide understanding of the implications of open software other than the extremely low price).
As a general comment, the mutatable nature of Linux is percieved as a potential disadvantage all the time here on Slashdot. People here are always fretting that the big distros are becoming more Windows-like, that KDE/Gnome is going to force desktop bloat down their gullets, that GUI admin tools are going to take their beloved commandline prowness away, and so on. Microsoft just put a funny image on a fear that many Linux users already have.
PARC could make money, by creating patentable (oooh, there's that word) technology then licensing it to other companies to develop into products. That's risky, though...
It's not that risky if it gets purchased by a large enough, well-enough capitalized corporation. Like, say, Hewlett-Packard.*
IBM, AT+T, and Lucent can afford to do basic research and wait 5-20 years for the profits to materialize.
*HP -- Their HQ is right down the road from PARC, they have been accused of being too stodgy, they desperately want to play in the big leagues. Seems like a good fit. That's what I'm laying my bet on anyway.
"Update Mach" and that's all, huh? I would think that they would need to update the Cocoa and probably the Carbon layers also.
Anyway, with Intel and AMD coming, "64-bit" is going to be a key marketing requirement for desktop systems in the next few years. (If it sells game consoles, it will sell computers.) Apple, however, has to hold off for practical reasons until they get their base moved to 32-bit OSX.
Yeah it's a troll post -- a real old and boring one, but one that's sure to get responses. Whine Bitch Netscape has Mail Support Bitch Whine Easy Karma Bitch Whine.
Look: Netscape has almost always had e-mail support. In fact lots of people (still) use it. Fairly large corporations have standardized on Netscape mail. I know of at least two people that use NS Messenger and browse the web with IE (even mailto: works properly with IE/Messenger, where it's still broken in Mozilla/any other MUA).
There is simply NO way that they could ship a product that is missing a huge amount of functionality thats been there since 1994. Real users (as opposed to you elite posuers) would rip them a huge new asshole. Get over with it.
Furthermore, Netscape Mail one of the only usable GUI mail clients on Unix, and yet all of you lamers are on a jihad to have it killed, presumably. And don't tell me about KMail or GOutlook or whatever, because it just ain't there yet.
But of course, you goobers don't need a GUI mail client because you are soooo happy with Pine or Mutt. Yeah that makes you superior... What? Pine was designed for drooling state school freshman internet newbies? Huh? What? Pine is just like a GUI client except without the mouse bindings? What? I can't heeaaar yooooou! All real UNIX gurus use 'mail'? What? Wha? Uhhh, doesn't matter because I use text mode and am soooo elite for doing so. Keep telling yourself that, and keep on trolling.
IE 5.5 puts the menu on the wrong side of the page and not in a constant position, but the mouseover effect is definately much smoother than Moz M18. In Moz, the black bar usually just flashes breifly and then disappears, and only by bumping the mouse around can you get the effect to work properly.
Yes, I've been there and IE's CSS support sucks (it's especially painful if you are trying to do dyanmic stylesheets from javascript - I have to check to see if Mozilla makes that nicer.) But your object example just seems to show that Mozilla might have all the interfaces in place, it's is still glitchy in execution, which makes it difficult to want to run out and use it.
The problem is, we don't see each other cars this way. You don't open a car magazine and see a bunch ads reading
**240 HP!!!** $15999
***280 HP!!**** $18299
!*!*!*! 300 HP!! WOW !*!*!*! $23929
But that's exactly what computer magazines look like. If anything, it shows how unsophisticated the market for computers is, and that people are totally unaware of the 100s of small subjective things that actually sell things like cars.
The only real solution for this is for CPUs to get so fast that the differences are irrelevant (are we there yet?), much like how car horse power ceased being important in the 1930s (and again in the 1990s) and people can focus on the non-quantifiable bits like reliablity, stablity, and maintainablity.
The way it works is that Microsoft gives the OEM (Dell in this case) a steep discount, if the OEM does certain things to 'restrict' piracy. One of those things is to refuse to sell OS-less machines, which makes sense becuase (face it) lots of people would just stick a pirated copy of Windows on it if they could save $50.
What sucks is that Dell will *only* give you the stupid BIOS locked OEM licenced Windows.
You can't ask to pay $100 more and get real Windows licence that you can transfer between machines.
What's even worse is that even if you have a full freight Windows 2000 site licence and all the correct paperwork and even ILOVEMS licence plates, Dell will still charge you for that copy of Windows 98. This isn't just about screwing over home users or guys who resell 98 CDs at computer shows -- Microsoft is forcing their own customers to double pay.
Flashback a couple years: Could the K7 arrive too late? With the Pentium II already dominating the high-end market, and the poor performance of the K6 series, AMD doesn't have a chance.
It doesn't make any sense to extrapolate, except to FUD Intel and for the fact that being an AMD fanboy earns points on slashdot. Sure, Intel is currently having problems with the P6 core at the end of it's lifecycle, but that's what the P4 is supposedly going to fix, and the chip is designed to get the clock speed up up up (because that's what sells chips).
The "high end" market goes where the performance is. Intel could fall on it's ass and so could AMD. What's more likely is that they will both stay within the same price/performance band in the near future, Intel will continue to keep the big OEM contracts that have made them rich, and AMD will continue to keep the loyalty of it's fans.
Face it, no form of Linux was designed around binary compatiblity. Leave that for Windows and their bug-compatible mandate.
If users can't handle binary distribution in a open source environment, it's a fault of the tools, not the users. There's no reason why somebody couldn't design a nice GUI tool that compiles and installs SRPMs or other source packages. On current hardware, that would be perfectly acceptable for 99% of the user-installed stuff. Big commercial packages can workaround the problems.
Thanks for the details about AMD's SMP implementation. (I followed up that Intel's 2-way SMP boards aren't 'free' anymore either, so perhaps additional cost involved for AMD isn't serious.)
There, I just used the magic word
OK, now try selling $1500 of commodity parts for $10,000. Hard to do unless you can sell scalability. Which for the hardware guys means adding CPUs. (BTW, have you seen what IBM or Compaq charges for a server CPU upgrade board? It must be a 200% margin - that's why they love Intel.)
The ADC-DVI adapter at the Apple Store allows you to connect an ADC Computer (Cube) to a DVI monitor (Cinema Display). As far as I can tell, it does not allow you to connect a ADC monitor to a DVI computer (old G4 or a PC).
I forgot to point out that, unlike with the BX, Intel is now essentially segmenting the market between the cheaper single cpu 815 and the more expensive SMP 840 chipset. (Not to mention the RAM issues.)
A company I consulted at had a proxy specifically set up to capture Hotmail, Yahoo and other webmail sites and archive the messages off so the bosses could read through them. At least they let us know this (we were the "good" consultants as opposed to those "bad" contractors that were always hunting for new jobs or mailing of company secrets or whatever.)
Don't know the product name, but that was 2 years ago.
At least in the Intel world, the cost difference between a 1 CPU BX Motherboard and a 2 CPU BX Motherboard is pretty small. (The BX chipset gives you 2 CPU support 'for free' -- we'll see if the AMD chipset does the same, or if you need to buy a special SMP chipset. With BX, it's more or less the same profit margin for the Mobo guys. Custom SMP boards are more risky for them.)
However, that's only the parts cost. SMP Systems have a huge margin advantage over single CPU systems. With SMP you can start using the magic words "server" and "workstation" which translates into higher profits for the resellers. And high profits are what endears OEMs to a particular vendor, and makes them more likely to adopt your product across an entire lineup.
Right now, it's not that big of a deal for AMD, because they are selling out their entire production capacity, and they aren't even in the high end markets. However, if they ever want to have a chance of winning a bid for corporate machines from a big OEM like Compaq or IBM (which make huge margins on Intel SMP machines), they need SMP support. It's critical enough in the long term that they should subsidize the mobo guys if that's what it takes.
My understanding is that Intel SMP was designed to run with different speed CPUs on the hardware level. However, doing so isn't supported under WinNT, and when someone mentioned it on the linux-kernel list, it didn't exactly sound like a configuration that Linux had been designed for either.
I was arguing against the idea of averaging because it would generate complaints -- I think Taco has thought it through a little more than that. Don't quit BTW -- your take on Sig11 and moderation/karma is pretty much right on as far as I'm concerned. Far too many people here who take this stuff far too seriously.
Exactly. It's been so long since Signal 11 was karma whoring that a good chunk of Slashdot readers probably weren't here when almost every story would lead with his Score 5 comment.
He was dead serious about it -- Unlike the trolls, there was no hint of irony. He only stopped after people wised up and stopped moderating his comments up, and then concocted a story about it being all a personal game of his. It might have been, but he certainly did not quit when he was on top.
That was over a year ago, and since then most the stuff he's posted here has been average drool. Yet now, he's the self-appointed expert on moderation issues, despite the fact that his "insightful" days have long passed. Oh well, the regular Signal 11 wasn't that bad, but he certainly couldn't back up the posturing found in his farewell speech or his IRC comments.
I believe the real reason Rob does not seriously consider doing averages
The big problem with an averaging system is that it makes the job of moderating much more complicated and less fun. Under Slashdot's system, it's pure instinct - good +1 , bad -1.
Compare this to kuro5hin, where the burden is on you to decide if a particular post is a "5" or "4" or a "3". Was a post unfaily rated at "3.62", so should you try to push the average up to "4.03"? Boring. You would have to be seriously anal about your webboard experience to get involved in that morass. I like reading there but I couldn't be bothered to moderate. Besides, if Slashdot had that system, 99% of moderators would vote either "1" or "5", and it would work out to the about the same thing anyway.
Moderation is not supposed to be some objective ranking of posts. It's just a rough mechanism that allows readers to tune the S/N ratio. There is no such thing as a post ranked at 3 that should have been ranked at 4 or 5. There is no such thing as a 5 post that should have been a 3 (some should be -1 Troll though). Worrying about these things is pretty uptight.
(Which is not to say there aren't some things that couldn't be tuned. Certain good AC posts never get moderated up and don't get archived. People also blow their mod points too early on a thread and get bitten by trolls.)
If you read that log, and the Kuro5hin log from a few days before it's pretty clear what Taco is talking about.
Signal 11 is not an idiot for what he's posted on Slashdot. Signal 11 is an idiot (from Taco's viewpoint) because he appointed himself as some sort of expert in topics having to do with moderation and then began to hound Taco about it, post essays on K5, etc.
Basically it boils down to this:
Signal 11: Slashdot is broken
CmdrTaco: Is Not
Signal 11: Is Too
CmdrTaco: Is Not
Signal 11: Is Too
CmdrTaco: You are an idiot.
Someone posted on an earlier slashdot article that Intel will be out of it's RAMBUS contracts by next year. We'll see -- they've already made it optional in all but their big box chipsets.
Slashdot Mirror
So the solution for MS is to downplay that advantage and try to turn it into a disadvantage, at least in the eyes of people who see their advertisements.
Note that's it's pretty much forbidden in advertising to admit your competitor has any advantages whatsoever, unless those advantages are widely accepted by the audience.
Which means that advantages of Open Source Software must be pretty well understood in Germany, otherwise MS's ironic FUDing of those advantages into a disavantage wouldn't have much affect. I can't see them running an ad in the US like that (where there really isn't a wide understanding of the implications of open software other than the extremely low price).
As a general comment, the mutatable nature of Linux is percieved as a potential disadvantage all the time here on Slashdot. People here are always fretting that the big distros are becoming more Windows-like, that KDE/Gnome is going to force desktop bloat down their gullets, that GUI admin tools are going to take their beloved commandline prowness away, and so on. Microsoft just put a funny image on a fear that many Linux users already have.
PARC could make money, by creating patentable (oooh, there's that word) technology then licensing it to other companies to develop into products. That's risky, though ...
It's not that risky if it gets purchased by a large enough, well-enough capitalized corporation. Like, say, Hewlett-Packard.*
IBM, AT+T, and Lucent can afford to do basic research and wait 5-20 years for the profits to materialize.
*HP -- Their HQ is right down the road from PARC, they have been accused of being too stodgy, they desperately want to play in the big leagues. Seems like a good fit. That's what I'm laying my bet on anyway.
Slashdot next year:
"AMD is 64 bits! Which one is more advanced? Signal 11!?"
"Do the math!"
You heard it here first.
"Update Mach" and that's all, huh? I would think that they would need to update the Cocoa and probably the Carbon layers also.
Anyway, with Intel and AMD coming, "64-bit" is going to be a key marketing requirement for desktop systems in the next few years. (If it sells game consoles, it will sell computers.) Apple, however, has to hold off for practical reasons until they get their base moved to 32-bit OSX.
What's funny about people snicker at the quote is that they draw totally the wrong conclusion from it:
IBM actually thought a world market of 10 computers was quite a few -- enough to warrant a major investment into the computer business.
Yeah it's a troll post -- a real old and boring one, but one that's sure to get responses. Whine Bitch Netscape has Mail Support Bitch Whine Easy Karma Bitch Whine.
Look: Netscape has almost always had e-mail support. In fact lots of people (still) use it. Fairly large corporations have standardized on Netscape mail. I know of at least two people that use NS Messenger and browse the web with IE (even mailto: works properly with IE/Messenger, where it's still broken in Mozilla/any other MUA).
There is simply NO way that they could ship a product that is missing a huge amount of functionality thats been there since 1994. Real users (as opposed to you elite posuers) would rip them a huge new asshole. Get over with it.
Furthermore, Netscape Mail one of the only usable GUI mail clients on Unix, and yet all of you lamers are on a jihad to have it killed, presumably. And don't tell me about KMail or GOutlook or whatever, because it just ain't there yet.
But of course, you goobers don't need a GUI mail client because you are soooo happy with Pine or Mutt. Yeah that makes you superior... What? Pine was designed for drooling state school freshman internet newbies? Huh? What? Pine is just like a GUI client except without the mouse bindings? What? I can't heeaaar yooooou! All real UNIX gurus use 'mail'? What? Wha? Uhhh, doesn't matter because I use text mode and am soooo elite for doing so. Keep telling yourself that, and keep on trolling.
About http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/:
IE 5.5 puts the menu on the wrong side of the page and not in a constant position, but the mouseover effect is definately much smoother than Moz M18. In Moz, the black bar usually just flashes breifly and then disappears, and only by bumping the mouse around can you get the effect to work properly.
Yes, I've been there and IE's CSS support sucks (it's especially painful if you are trying to do dyanmic stylesheets from javascript - I have to check to see if Mozilla makes that nicer.) But your object example just seems to show that Mozilla might have all the interfaces in place, it's is still glitchy in execution, which makes it difficult to want to run out and use it.
We sold you cars this way, why not computers?
The problem is, we don't see each other cars this way. You don't open a car magazine and see a bunch ads reading
**240 HP!!!** $15999
***280 HP!!**** $18299
!*!*!*! 300 HP!! WOW !*!*!*! $23929
But that's exactly what computer magazines look like. If anything, it shows how unsophisticated the market for computers is, and that people are totally unaware of the 100s of small subjective things that actually sell things like cars.
The only real solution for this is for CPUs to get so fast that the differences are irrelevant (are we there yet?), much like how car horse power ceased being important in the 1930s (and again in the 1990s) and people can focus on the non-quantifiable bits like reliablity, stablity, and maintainablity.
The way it works is that Microsoft gives the OEM (Dell in this case) a steep discount, if the OEM does certain things to 'restrict' piracy. One of those things is to refuse to sell OS-less machines, which makes sense becuase (face it) lots of people would just stick a pirated copy of Windows on it if they could save $50.
What sucks is that Dell will *only* give you the stupid BIOS locked OEM licenced Windows.
You can't ask to pay $100 more and get real Windows licence that you can transfer between machines.
What's even worse is that even if you have a full freight Windows 2000 site licence and all the correct paperwork and even ILOVEMS licence plates, Dell will still charge you for that copy of Windows 98. This isn't just about screwing over home users or guys who resell 98 CDs at computer shows -- Microsoft is forcing their own customers to double pay.
Flashback a couple years: Could the K7 arrive too late? With the Pentium II already dominating the high-end market, and the poor performance of the K6 series, AMD doesn't have a chance.
It doesn't make any sense to extrapolate, except to FUD Intel and for the fact that being an AMD fanboy earns points on slashdot. Sure, Intel is currently having problems with the P6 core at the end of it's lifecycle, but that's what the P4 is supposedly going to fix, and the chip is designed to get the clock speed up up up (because that's what sells chips).
The "high end" market goes where the performance is. Intel could fall on it's ass and so could AMD. What's more likely is that they will both stay within the same price/performance band in the near future, Intel will continue to keep the big OEM contracts that have made them rich, and AMD will continue to keep the loyalty of it's fans.
Face it, no form of Linux was designed around binary compatiblity. Leave that for Windows and their bug-compatible mandate.
If users can't handle binary distribution in a open source environment, it's a fault of the tools, not the users. There's no reason why somebody couldn't design a nice GUI tool that compiles and installs SRPMs or other source packages. On current hardware, that would be perfectly acceptable for 99% of the user-installed stuff. Big commercial packages can workaround the problems.
Thanks for the details about AMD's SMP implementation. (I followed up that Intel's 2-way SMP boards aren't 'free' anymore either, so perhaps additional cost involved for AMD isn't serious.)
There, I just used the magic word
OK, now try selling $1500 of commodity parts for $10,000. Hard to do unless you can sell scalability. Which for the hardware guys means adding CPUs. (BTW, have you seen what IBM or Compaq charges for a server CPU upgrade board? It must be a 200% margin - that's why they love Intel.)
Oops - it's the OLD Cinema Display that has a DVI - the new one is ADC.
The question still is: Can you just turn around the Apple adapter and do DVI to ADC?
The 22" Cinema Display has a DVI connector.
The ADC-DVI adapter at the Apple Store allows you to connect an ADC Computer (Cube) to a DVI monitor (Cinema Display). As far as I can tell, it does not allow you to connect a ADC monitor to a DVI computer (old G4 or a PC).
How about:
....
Does the 2D look any good on my monitor, because I spend far more time using 2D than playing 3D games?
I forgot to point out that, unlike with the BX, Intel is now essentially segmenting the market between the cheaper single cpu 815 and the more expensive SMP 840 chipset. (Not to mention the RAM issues.)
A company I consulted at had a proxy specifically set up to capture Hotmail, Yahoo and other webmail sites and archive the messages off so the bosses could read through them. At least they let us know this (we were the "good" consultants as opposed to those "bad" contractors that were always hunting for new jobs or mailing of company secrets or whatever.)
Don't know the product name, but that was 2 years ago.
At least in the Intel world, the cost difference between a 1 CPU BX Motherboard and a 2 CPU BX Motherboard is pretty small. (The BX chipset gives you 2 CPU support 'for free' -- we'll see if the AMD chipset does the same, or if you need to buy a special SMP chipset. With BX, it's more or less the same profit margin for the Mobo guys. Custom SMP boards are more risky for them.)
However, that's only the parts cost. SMP Systems have a huge margin advantage over single CPU systems. With SMP you can start using the magic words "server" and "workstation" which translates into higher profits for the resellers. And high profits are what endears OEMs to a particular vendor, and makes them more likely to adopt your product across an entire lineup.
Right now, it's not that big of a deal for AMD, because they are selling out their entire production capacity, and they aren't even in the high end markets. However, if they ever want to have a chance of winning a bid for corporate machines from a big OEM like Compaq or IBM (which make huge margins on Intel SMP machines), they need SMP support. It's critical enough in the long term that they should subsidize the mobo guys if that's what it takes.
My understanding is that Intel SMP was designed to run with different speed CPUs on the hardware level. However, doing so isn't supported under WinNT, and when someone mentioned it on the linux-kernel list, it didn't exactly sound like a configuration that Linux had been designed for either.
What OS are you running?
They are comparing it to a desktop PIII.
At least in my experience, the special laptop CPUs from Intel are noticibly slower than the regular versions.
Not like I'd notice.
I was arguing against the idea of averaging because it would generate complaints -- I think Taco has thought it through a little more than that. Don't quit BTW -- your take on Sig11 and moderation/karma is pretty much right on as far as I'm concerned. Far too many people here who take this stuff far too seriously.
Exactly. It's been so long since Signal 11 was karma whoring that a good chunk of Slashdot readers probably weren't here when almost every story would lead with his Score 5 comment.
He was dead serious about it -- Unlike the trolls, there was no hint of irony. He only stopped after people wised up and stopped moderating his comments up, and then concocted a story about it being all a personal game of his. It might have been, but he certainly did not quit when he was on top.
That was over a year ago, and since then most the stuff he's posted here has been average drool. Yet now, he's the self-appointed expert on moderation issues, despite the fact that his "insightful" days have long passed. Oh well, the regular Signal 11 wasn't that bad, but he certainly couldn't back up the posturing found in his farewell speech or his IRC comments.
I believe the real reason Rob does not seriously consider doing averages
The big problem with an averaging system is that it makes the job of moderating much more complicated and less fun. Under Slashdot's system, it's pure instinct - good +1 , bad -1.
Compare this to kuro5hin, where the burden is on you to decide if a particular post is a "5" or "4" or a "3". Was a post unfaily rated at "3.62", so should you try to push the average up to "4.03"? Boring. You would have to be seriously anal about your webboard experience to get involved in that morass. I like reading there but I couldn't be bothered to moderate. Besides, if Slashdot had that system, 99% of moderators would vote either "1" or "5", and it would work out to the about the same thing anyway.
Moderation is not supposed to be some objective ranking of posts. It's just a rough mechanism that allows readers to tune the S/N ratio. There is no such thing as a post ranked at 3 that should have been ranked at 4 or 5. There is no such thing as a 5 post that should have been a 3 (some should be -1 Troll though). Worrying about these things is pretty uptight.
(Which is not to say there aren't some things that couldn't be tuned. Certain good AC posts never get moderated up and don't get archived. People also blow their mod points too early on a thread and get bitten by trolls.)
If you read that log, and the Kuro5hin log from a few days before it's pretty clear what Taco is talking about.
Signal 11 is not an idiot for what he's posted on Slashdot. Signal 11 is an idiot (from Taco's viewpoint) because he appointed himself as some sort of expert in topics having to do with moderation and then began to hound Taco about it, post essays on K5, etc.
Basically it boils down to this:
Signal 11: Slashdot is broken
CmdrTaco: Is Not
Signal 11: Is Too
CmdrTaco: Is Not
Signal 11: Is Too
CmdrTaco: You are an idiot.
Someone posted on an earlier slashdot article that Intel will be out of it's RAMBUS contracts by next year. We'll see -- they've already made it optional in all but their big box chipsets.