Microsoft is counting on Windows Media Center being the "next big thing" to give it the growth that it needs to justify its price/earnings ratio. A Linux-based contender in the same market developed by one of Microsoft's biggest allies is almost certainly going to be a major setback for Microsoft's plans.
That's an excellent point. I would agree that in recently malware has become one of the main reasons that people upgrade their machines. However, that's a fairly recent phenomenon. Even worse (for Microsoft anyway), it is not a problem that a new computer running Windows is likely to fix over the long run.
Computers may be fairly inexpensive these days, but if folks start having to purchase a new one (and migrate all of their files and applications) every year then the idea of switching to an entirely new operating system isn't going to seem like such a bother.
When push comes to shove Microsoft is going to have to entice consumers to purchase a new machine, and a new version of Internet Explorer just ain't bait enough. Especially if the only advantage that a new version of IE has over Firefox is the ability to catch IE malware.
Yes, but the new versions of Windows generally are one of the reasons that people purchase a new computer. With Longhorn (as it currently stands) there is very little reason to chuck your current computer and get a new one.
For example, there was plenty of reason for all of the folks running Windows 98 to go out and get a new computer running Windows XP. XP was about a million times better than Windows 98. With Longhorn that incentive simply doesn't exist. The primary difference between Longhorn and XP is going to be a new version of IE (everything else is going to be backported to XP).
Microsoft has a price/earnings ratio of well over 30. It needs to provide some growth. Microsoft execs have been promising investors that growth with Longhorn, but unless they can get people excited about the upgrade it simply isn't going to happen.
No doubt Microsoft realizes that the current list of features for Longhorn is pretty sad, and that is why most of the early Longhorn users are almost certainly going to be those folks that were in the market for a new machine when Longhorn was coming out. However, both Microsoft and the computer OEMs are counting on Longhorn to actually drive sales. If Longhorn doesn't have cool new features then folks might decide that their existing XP machine is good enough for a while. Heck, there is still a sizeable group of people using Windows 98. If Windows XP isn't enough to get people off of the Win9X versions of Windows then Microsoft is going to be hard pressed to get people to upgrade XP, and a fancy new version of IE is about all the ammunition that Microsoft has got.
Microsoft is definitely sweating the Longhorn launch. Microsoft needs to start producing some growth, or investors are going to start to wonder why MSFT has a price/earnings ratio well over 30.
Microsoft wants Windows users to have plenty of reason to switch. They just want them to switch to Longhorn.
That's actually the biggest problem with Microsoft's current business model. With each new generation of their software they have to convince a substantial portion of their install base that to upgrade. If Microsoft releases Longhorn and customers decide that they would rather stick with Windows XP then Microsoft is just as screwed as if Linux had achieved Total World Domination. Microsoft's biggest competitor is old versions of its own software, and the competition gets harder to beat with each new iteration.
That's why Microsoft isn't interested in coming out with another version of IE for XP. Instead Microsoft would much rather bundle the new version with Longhorn in the hopes that it might persuade some XP users that now is the time to upgrade. After all, without WinFS, and with XAML being backported to XP there is going to be precious little that would persuade customers to upgrade. A new version of IE might very well be the biggest reason to upgrade to Longhorn from XP.
For the record, I started working at Sun when I was 17, though I don't think they knew that. My age just never came up.
Yes, even in the commercial software world it was possible to break the mold, especially in the early days of software when there was much less structure, and far fewer suits. Heck, if you look at most of the early movers and shakers in the software biz you will realize that a disproportionate amount of the work was done by undergraduate students and college dropouts. These folks had time to burn and the stamina to hack for days.
However, no matter who you are Mr. Anonymous I can basically guarantee that you weren't in charge of a project of the same magnitude as the 2.4 version of the Linux kernel at 17, and you certainly didn't do it from a third world country like Brazil. You were at the right place at the right time, you had the requisite skills, and no one cared how old you were. Now imagine doing something similar from Brazil.
Free Software doesn't have a coherent set of goals. Ask any three Free Software hackers why they write Free Software and you are likely to get five answers. What Free Software has is an economic model that works.
Take Linux, for instance. What are the chances of an undergraduate student from Finland being allowed to hack on a commercial operating system? None, there is no chance that anyone would have give Linus a shot at meaningful work on a commercial operating system when he first started hacking Linux. Once Linus did write Linux what were the chances of Linux being able to compete with the various and sundry commercial operating systems if Linus charged people money to use it? No one would have paid money for early versions of Linux, and no one in their right mind would have even played with Linux had it not come complete with source code distributed under a permissive license.
Fast forward a few years and Linux is slowly crushing the life out of commercial operating systems, and it continues to do so with hackers that wouldn't have a prayer of getting a shot at meaningful work in the commercial software world. Marcelo Tosatti was maintaining the 2.4 kernel as an 18-year-old high-school student in Brasil. What are the chances of Sun or Microsoft giving that kid a job. Yet Marcelo has been making money writing Linux software since he was 13. He's currently employed by Cyclades. Linus, and most of the other kernel hackers, are also doing far better with Free Software than they would have been had they followed more "normal" career paths. You see, that's the little secret of Free Software, most of the folks writing Free Software get paid to do so. Those that don't get paid directly usually get indirect financial benefits, and they can at least use their Free Software success as a calling card.
The end result is software that is cheaper to write and maintain than conventional software written by folks that get paid to do what they would probably do for free.
The reason that Microsoft comes into the discussion has very little to do with the "goals" of Free Software and everything to do with the fact that Microsoft is doing everything in their power to maintain the status quo. Microsoft has built their business around an economic model that requires huge profit margins, and the Free Software business model is destroying those margins. Microsoft controls the computer market, and they are using their current market dominance to drive their incompatible file formats and incomprehensible protocols. Free Software hackers simply want their software to get used (for a variety of reasons, many of which are economic), and Microsoft stands in the way of this goal.
This isn't saying that there aren't some Linux hackers that don't *hate* Microsoft, but it's not the hate that is driving Free Software adoption, it's the economics.
Right now it makes sense to compare tall buildings with wind farms, because we don't have very many wind farms. However, when you start talking about building enough wind farms to generate even a fraction of the energy that we currently use you start to realize that you are talking about a *lot* of wind farms.
Oh really. I think that you are overstating the case for global warming. In fact, the article that spawned this discussion points out that there are still more unknown variables than known facts. Take this quote from the article:
The ice-core trends of temperature and greenhouse gases match so precisely that there has been room for doubt as to what is cause and what is effect. Thus, could the temperature changes be driving CO2/methane levels in the atmosphere (by altering patterns of global biomass production and storage, say) rather than the other way around? If this was true, then the currently increasing levels of CO2 and methane need not give rise to significant global warming: they would be a consequence, rather than a cause.
This article is actually much more honest than most in that it points out the basic assumption in the researcher's hypothesis. The researchers "assume" that CO2 levels are the cause of the higher temperatures and not the result of higher temperatures. Despite the stated problems with the research the paper goes on to paint an extremely grim picture of our future world, and goes as far as to suggest possible (drastic) remedies for the high CO2 concentrations. The reason for this is obvious. Far more money is spent on research that promises to "save the world" than is spent on more mundane topics.
The folks writing this paper want their government to sponsor more expensive artic expeditions, and so they can't just say that global temperature and CO2 levels are highly related. Instead they have to predict catastrophe.
Microsoft is pushing XML for two reasons. The first reasons is that pushing XML for Office documents means that they can force their customers to upgrade to the newest version. Right now Microsoft's biggest competitor in the office suite race isn't OpenOffice.org or Corel's PerfectOffice. Microsoft's biggest competitor in this space are old versions of their own MS Office suite. Microsoft is desperate to move folks that are currently using Office 97 or Office 2000 to their newest offering. The easiest way to force people to migrate to the newest version of MS Office is to monkey with the document format. If older versions of MS Office can't open the newer files, then the folks on the old versions have a problem. When Office 97 came out Microsoft simply changed the binary format. This made enough of Microsoft's big customers upset enough that Microsoft can't really pull that trick again. By mixing the document format change with something that some people actually want (easily integratable XML formats), Microsoft can introduce a new document format without upsetting their big customers.
Microsoft's reasoning behind embracing XML as a format for their web services initiative is similar. Microsoft saw that Java was running away with the enterprise application market, and the execs at Microsoft knew that they had to do something to compete in this arena. One of the easiest ways to do this was to adopt some of the same standards that folks like IBM were adopting. Microsoft knew that unless their.NET servers could talk to Java application servers that they didn't have a chance, and so they opted for compatibility. For similar reasons Microsoft also opened up the specs for large portions of their.NET architecture (which is what spawned Mono). Microsoft knew that customers like standards, and since Microsoft was having to compete with Java for developers it realized that one of the cheapest ways to differentiate.NET from Java was to make it an open standard.
Basically Microsoft is only open to the extent that being open is good for business. Microsoft knows from long experience that closed source and opaque formats generally produce higher profit margins, but in certain key areas Microsoft is so interested in enticing buyers that it is willing to sweeten the deal with a bit of open document formats and network protocols. Think of XML as Microsoft's 0% financing or two-for-one sale pricing and you won't be too far off the mark.
Fah, ratings work for blogs the same way that they do for "regular" news sources. After all, who cares if a blog is full of crap if no one reads it. Both network television and the popular blogs that are to some extent supplanting network television are financed by advertising revenue, and so they get paid for precisely the same way.
In the end the only real difference between a popular blog and network television is that it takes the networks months to run Dan Rather when he fabricates a story. In the blog world there is far more competition, and far more choices. Blogs that have a reputation for innacuracy lose readers in a hurry.
That's actually the wrong question when it comes to OEM installs. After all, if you buy the OEM version of Windows it doesn't come with any support at all. Microsoft has been very successful at offloading Windows support onto the systems builders.
That's why, for the system builder, Linux is a clear win. It lowers their overall cost of the machine without significantly raising their support costs (especially now that Intel is willing to help make sure that the hardware is Linux compatible). As an added bonus a large percentage of the folks that currently buy Linux on their machines later go on to put a pirated version of Windows on the machine. For the system builder this means that they don't have to worry about support *at all*.
Basically preloading Linux allows systems builders to lower the overall price of the hardware they sell, and for Intel that's a definite win. The lower the overall system price the more hardware Intel can sell.
The problem with software patents is that they don't really protect "the little guy," at least not if the little guy actually writes software.
Let's say, for example, that your small company gets a patent on some cool idea and creates a software product based around this idea. Now, let's further speculate that your idea becomes the next web browser, the money starts rolling in, and Microsoft announces plans to create a similar product.
Your company is safe because it has a patent, right?
Wrong, because chances are good that your company infringes on all sorts of patents that Microsoft has, including stupid patents like the double click and the isNot operator. So the Microsoft folks show up with a stack of papers three feet thick detailing all of the ways in which your product violates their patents. Now, theoretically you could fight Microsoft, but the reality is that the litigation could easily cost you hundreds of millions of dollars, and there is a good chance that you would lose on at least some of the patent infringement charges.
So what do you do? You cross license your patents with Microsoft, and you probably end up paying Microsoft some money because they have more patents than you do. After all, you still want to be able to sell your product.
The only case in which patents help "the little guy" is in those cases where the little company doesn't actually write software. Microsoft (or IBM, or Sun, or whoever) can't put pressure to cross license patents on companies like Eolas, because Eolas doesn't actually have any products.
In the real world all patents do to "the little guy" is force up his development overhead. This gives the larger development firms a distinct advantage. They already have patents that they can cross-license, but you don't. This allows the large software houses the ability to shut down smaller shops essentially at will. How many small companies can afford to litigate against IBM or Microsoft?
Now, if you want to live in a world where the little guys have to satisfy themselves thinking up patentable ideas instead of actually writing software, that's fine. It's not where I want to live, however.
Sure applications can be ported to Solaris with relatively little pain if you know what you are doing. However, how many of the Windows developers that are currently shifting to Linux really know what they are doing with UNIX. To these UNIX newbies every difference between Linux and Solaris will seem like a very big deal.
Where Linux wins is that it has much broader hardware support. Developers and systems administrators can run Linux on their desktop without purchasing special (read expensive) Sun hardware. Newbie UNIX developers are going to feel a lot more comfortable running the same OS on their server as they do on their desktop (they're used to that). Not to mention the fact that choosing Linux means that you can get hardware and service from any number of sources. Sun's hardware and support may be great, but it's also fairly expensive. Microsoft has shown us for years that developer desktops are a very important commodity.
Even the most paranoid of developers will feel more comfortable with an all-Linux arrangement than they did with an all-Microsoft solution. After all, they'll know that they can switch to Solaris if they need to (or HP-UX, or AIX, or possibly even Windows if they used the right Linux tools). Just because you *can* switch doesn't mean that you will.
Besides, even if Solaris 10 made some serious strides, I wouldn't be one bit surprised to see Linux outperform it handily in most workloads. A lot of work has gone into making Linux work well on commodity hardware. Solaris simply hasn't had that sort of testing yet.
When push comes to shove Linux has a lot of momentum, and you can bet that the folks at IBM, Dell, HP, and the large bulk of whitebox server vendors aren't going to be pushing Solaris boxes. Linux also has the developer base, and the desktop compatibility. What Solaris has is a lot of customers that, over the last few years, have been pretty keen on getting away from Solaris and onto Linux.
My prediction is that a Free Solaris doesn't even cause a momentary dip in Linux adoption.
That's funny, I don't think that I have ever met a Canadian or a Mexican that wanted to be referred to as an "American."
The whole USian (or whatever) is nothing more than a big fat crock of @#$%! More people refer to themselves as "Earthlings" than refer to themselves as being "from the American continent." In fact, I doubt that you can think of one person on the entire planet (who isn't a/. troll) that is confused by the term "American" referring to a citizen of the United States of America.
Heck, the English translation of the formal name for Mexico is the United States of Mexico. So in the surrealistic fantasy world where U.S. citizens are USians then Mexican citizens could be USians as well (since you are speaking in English).
Long story short, the English language doesn't parse like Python or Perl. There are exceptions big enough to drive a boat through. You can spend all day pointing out inconsistencies but no one with any friends is likely to care.
Exactly. I would much rather have all the smart and ambitious people come to America. In todays economy I have to compete with them one way or the other. I would just as soon that their house didn't cost two orders of magnitude less than mine.
Good hell. You should try reading the article before you post. Patrick did go to the doctor. In fact, he went to lots of doctors, and they all did precisely the same (wrong) thing. Patrick's research (and Google) was what finally provided the clues that lead to proper diagnosis.
You should definitely consult a doctor, but anyone with a serious medical issue that doesn't take the time to do some personal research is a fool. Doctors have a lot to do, and they don't get paid for research. The average individual with an Internet connection has access to more medical information than even the most well-connected doctors did 10 years ago. In this case there was almost no chance that the average local doctor would have any experience with this sort of infection. Heck, most of the information available on the Net is about postmortem cases where the patient died because the doctor misdiagnosed the illness.
Re:Disconnect and motivation
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The Music Man
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· Score: 2, Insightful
The RIAA goes after folks "distributing" their copyrighted works because that what triggers the copy protection laws in the U.S. Basically U.S. laws were designed around stopping organized crime for making and selling counterfeit copies of popular albums, books, etc. The laws assumed that expensive equipment was needed to make these copies, and that a sophisticated system of underground marketing was needed to get the copies into legitimate channels. Because of this the penalties for distributing copyrighted material illegally are very very harsh. After all, the people that used to engage in the illegal distribution of copyrighted material were the most pernicious sort of organized criminal.
These laws are seem somewhat ridiculous in an age where a 14 year-old girl with a $300 computer and a broadband connection can distribute gigabytes of copyrighted material, but that's how things work. Fortunately for filesharers the RIAA has not been keen on sending folks to prison.
The reason that there aren't any end user lawsuits concerning patents that Windows infringes is that the patent holders tend to go after Microsoft directly. Microsoft is currently facing over 30 patent infringement suits. Most patent holders are more interested in going after Microsoft's cash hoard than in penny-ante attacks on Microsoft's customers.
Microsoft finally realized that since they were going to bear the brunt of the patent infringement lawsuits that they might as well formalize the arrangement. After all, some of Microsoft's customers apparently think that this is a big deal.
Fah, Best Buy had a problem with customers buying an item, applying for the rebate, returning the item, and then coming back into the store to buy the same item after it was marked down as a return.
If that's not a devil customer, I am not sure who would qualify.
What Best Buy has done is change their practices to cut down on the amount of outright abuse. Personally, mail in rebates tick me off, so I am not about to spend my money at Best Buy, but I can understand why they would change their policy. I would also bet that most people won't even notice the difference. The only people that care are the Devil Customers that were abusing Best Buys' policies.
Microsoft has been trying to "clean its plate" for some time now, and yet lawsuits keep piling up like snow in Alaska. The reason for this is simple. Microsoft has a lot of money (they make a good target), and they have made some less than stellar decisions in the past. Add to that the fact that they are essentially a convicted monopolist and you have a situation that allows for a lot of softball lawsuits with the potential for a huge payout.
$536 million might be chump change for Microsoft, but it's a very healthy sum for Novell. Novell's Linux initiatives require an order of magnitude less R&D investment than Microsoft's initiatives. Novell can make this money go a very long way.
Microsoft settled because they are afraid of what would happen if this went to court. Microsoft has a lot of skeletons in its closet, and Novell's Netware went from having 70+% of the market to having considerably less than that. If a jury found that Microsoft had taken that marketshare illegally then the potential punishment could be very very substantial.
I'm not exactly sure why this would be true. If you want to compare apples to apples then you'd be comparing $59/copy Novell Linux (or similar RHEL) with $89/copy Windows. Both can be easily setup to do remote terminal displays. It's not fair to use the free OSS Linux distros and compare them with Windows Exchange Server.
Yes, but it is fair to compare Novell Linux win Windows + MS Office. Linux gets the nod because I can deploy it in a thin client configuration for $59 a seat. Unfortunately, Microsoft's thin client solutions don't come anywhere close to touching that. 70 Linux thin clients means 70 less hard drives that I have to worry about, and it also guarantees that upgrading the overall system is as easy as pie. Software updates are made to a handful of machines, and when I want to upgrade the hardware I simply swap out the server and everyone's desktop runs a little faster.
OpenOffice.org gets the nod because it would puts a full-fledged, mostly MS compatible, office suite on every node in the plant for no additional price.
In short, you put Linux thin clients on the floor because the applications available for Linux are "good enough" and the potential savings are tremendous.
Novell is going after the "low hanging fruit" in much the same way that Red Hat's biggest efforts to date have been in convincing Solaris customers to switch to Linux. What's the sense in attacking Microsoft outright when you can make more money somewhere else.
The folks at Novell know that over the long haul an inexpensive, secure, and stable no-frills desktop is going to make a market for itself just about everywhere. However, Novell is absolutely right in pointing out that for right now the obvious application is in locations where a minimal set of applications is needed.
To give you an example, I used to work in a french fry factory. The factory had about 90 PCs, but less than 20 of these PCs were used by office workers. The rest of the PCs were out in the plant and were used mostly to let people out on the floor view data. The machines out on the plant floor could easily have been running Linux, and it would have saved the company a substantial sum of money.
Novell knows that there are lots of businesses like that french fry plant, and they also know that in the long run once these locations get a little bit of experience with Linux clients that essentially run themselves that the IT folks are going to start looking at ways to migrate the remaining office workers to Linux. More importantly, when they buy or build new applications they will be far more likely to create the applications in a way that is portable to Linux.
Which brings us to the second part of Novell's master plan. Novell plans to use Mono to entice existing.NET developers into creating cross-platform applications.
And by wanting the adoption rules skewed against them, you aren't in favor of letting them try to do just that. "Before you can do X, you have to demonstrate that you can do X" is a guaranteed impossibility for any X you choose to pick.
I agree that gathering this data is difficult, but it is certainly not impossible. There are plenty of gay and lesbian couples that are currently raising their own children, and there is also the experiment in the Netherlands. Your problem is that you want to elevate gay marriage to an equal status as traditional marriage without first insuring that gay marriage is as beneficial to society. Face it, gay marriage is an unproven social experiment at this point. Throwing innocent children into the experiment is unethical. It would be like testing new medicines on three-year-old orphans because you are "pretty sure" that the medicine is going to work. I don't want to skew the adoption laws one bit. I simply want to maintain the current status quo. It is the gays and lesbians that want to change the laws.
The Dutch statistics only show that people are no more or less likely to separate with or without government influence. Regardless of what the piece of paper says, they are no more or less likely to stay a couple. It neither helps nor hinders.
First of all, at least in America it is much easier to get married than divorced in all but the most trivial of amicable divorces. My father's an attorney, and he no longer does divorces as they can be very messy. Say what you will, but the pains of a divorce is definitely an incentive to try and make a marriage work. In the Netherlands, on the other hand it is much easier to get a divorce. In fact, the translated Dutch paper on the subject that I read referred to them as "flash divorces." You can pretend that this doesn't effect the divorce rate in the Netherlands, but the actual statistics prove otherwise. For whatever reason the Dutch are far more likely to divorce than they were ten years ago.
Now, the reason that I talk about the benefits of marriage versus the benefits of cohabiting is that most of the research that I have looked at over the last few days specifically mentions cohabiting couples. Statistically cohabiting couples fare only slightly better than single mothers in their parenting abilities. Even stepparents do better on average. I imagine that part of this is that it is difficult to pick out single mothers with lots of erstwhile partners from folks like your Dutch friends that simply have an aversion to traditional marriage. It is possible that the Dutch have invented a new type of family unit that is as capable and stable as the traditional family, but if they haven't then the Dutch society is going to be faced with a lot of problems in the next few years.
A promise to love someone for the rest of your life, and stay with them, is really none of the government's business.
That's our biggest difference of opinion. I believe that if families truly are more beneficial to society than other unions that the society has an obligation to promote traditional families for the good of everyone. So far both the hard evidence and the popular sentiment are in my corner (at least in the U.S.). To counteract this the gay and lesbian coalitions are either going to cough up some evidence of their own, or they are going to have to find some way to sway public opinion in the absence of that data.
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft is counting on Windows Media Center being the "next big thing" to give it the growth that it needs to justify its price/earnings ratio. A Linux-based contender in the same market developed by one of Microsoft's biggest allies is almost certainly going to be a major setback for Microsoft's plans.
That's an excellent point. I would agree that in recently malware has become one of the main reasons that people upgrade their machines. However, that's a fairly recent phenomenon. Even worse (for Microsoft anyway), it is not a problem that a new computer running Windows is likely to fix over the long run.
Computers may be fairly inexpensive these days, but if folks start having to purchase a new one (and migrate all of their files and applications) every year then the idea of switching to an entirely new operating system isn't going to seem like such a bother.
When push comes to shove Microsoft is going to have to entice consumers to purchase a new machine, and a new version of Internet Explorer just ain't bait enough. Especially if the only advantage that a new version of IE has over Firefox is the ability to catch IE malware.
Yes, but the new versions of Windows generally are one of the reasons that people purchase a new computer. With Longhorn (as it currently stands) there is very little reason to chuck your current computer and get a new one.
For example, there was plenty of reason for all of the folks running Windows 98 to go out and get a new computer running Windows XP. XP was about a million times better than Windows 98. With Longhorn that incentive simply doesn't exist. The primary difference between Longhorn and XP is going to be a new version of IE (everything else is going to be backported to XP).
Microsoft has a price/earnings ratio of well over 30. It needs to provide some growth. Microsoft execs have been promising investors that growth with Longhorn, but unless they can get people excited about the upgrade it simply isn't going to happen.
No doubt Microsoft realizes that the current list of features for Longhorn is pretty sad, and that is why most of the early Longhorn users are almost certainly going to be those folks that were in the market for a new machine when Longhorn was coming out. However, both Microsoft and the computer OEMs are counting on Longhorn to actually drive sales. If Longhorn doesn't have cool new features then folks might decide that their existing XP machine is good enough for a while. Heck, there is still a sizeable group of people using Windows 98. If Windows XP isn't enough to get people off of the Win9X versions of Windows then Microsoft is going to be hard pressed to get people to upgrade XP, and a fancy new version of IE is about all the ammunition that Microsoft has got.
Microsoft is definitely sweating the Longhorn launch. Microsoft needs to start producing some growth, or investors are going to start to wonder why MSFT has a price/earnings ratio well over 30.
Microsoft wants Windows users to have plenty of reason to switch. They just want them to switch to Longhorn.
That's actually the biggest problem with Microsoft's current business model. With each new generation of their software they have to convince a substantial portion of their install base that to upgrade. If Microsoft releases Longhorn and customers decide that they would rather stick with Windows XP then Microsoft is just as screwed as if Linux had achieved Total World Domination. Microsoft's biggest competitor is old versions of its own software, and the competition gets harder to beat with each new iteration.
That's why Microsoft isn't interested in coming out with another version of IE for XP. Instead Microsoft would much rather bundle the new version with Longhorn in the hopes that it might persuade some XP users that now is the time to upgrade. After all, without WinFS, and with XAML being backported to XP there is going to be precious little that would persuade customers to upgrade. A new version of IE might very well be the biggest reason to upgrade to Longhorn from XP.
Slashdot has no business linking to "normal" sites.
Yes, even in the commercial software world it was possible to break the mold, especially in the early days of software when there was much less structure, and far fewer suits. Heck, if you look at most of the early movers and shakers in the software biz you will realize that a disproportionate amount of the work was done by undergraduate students and college dropouts. These folks had time to burn and the stamina to hack for days.
However, no matter who you are Mr. Anonymous I can basically guarantee that you weren't in charge of a project of the same magnitude as the 2.4 version of the Linux kernel at 17, and you certainly didn't do it from a third world country like Brazil. You were at the right place at the right time, you had the requisite skills, and no one cared how old you were. Now imagine doing something similar from Brazil.
Free Software doesn't have a coherent set of goals. Ask any three Free Software hackers why they write Free Software and you are likely to get five answers. What Free Software has is an economic model that works.
Take Linux, for instance. What are the chances of an undergraduate student from Finland being allowed to hack on a commercial operating system? None, there is no chance that anyone would have give Linus a shot at meaningful work on a commercial operating system when he first started hacking Linux. Once Linus did write Linux what were the chances of Linux being able to compete with the various and sundry commercial operating systems if Linus charged people money to use it? No one would have paid money for early versions of Linux, and no one in their right mind would have even played with Linux had it not come complete with source code distributed under a permissive license.
Fast forward a few years and Linux is slowly crushing the life out of commercial operating systems, and it continues to do so with hackers that wouldn't have a prayer of getting a shot at meaningful work in the commercial software world. Marcelo Tosatti was maintaining the 2.4 kernel as an 18-year-old high-school student in Brasil. What are the chances of Sun or Microsoft giving that kid a job. Yet Marcelo has been making money writing Linux software since he was 13. He's currently employed by Cyclades. Linus, and most of the other kernel hackers, are also doing far better with Free Software than they would have been had they followed more "normal" career paths. You see, that's the little secret of Free Software, most of the folks writing Free Software get paid to do so. Those that don't get paid directly usually get indirect financial benefits, and they can at least use their Free Software success as a calling card.
The end result is software that is cheaper to write and maintain than conventional software written by folks that get paid to do what they would probably do for free.
The reason that Microsoft comes into the discussion has very little to do with the "goals" of Free Software and everything to do with the fact that Microsoft is doing everything in their power to maintain the status quo. Microsoft has built their business around an economic model that requires huge profit margins, and the Free Software business model is destroying those margins. Microsoft controls the computer market, and they are using their current market dominance to drive their incompatible file formats and incomprehensible protocols. Free Software hackers simply want their software to get used (for a variety of reasons, many of which are economic), and Microsoft stands in the way of this goal.
This isn't saying that there aren't some Linux hackers that don't *hate* Microsoft, but it's not the hate that is driving Free Software adoption, it's the economics.
Right now it makes sense to compare tall buildings with wind farms, because we don't have very many wind farms. However, when you start talking about building enough wind farms to generate even a fraction of the energy that we currently use you start to realize that you are talking about a *lot* of wind farms.
Oh really. I think that you are overstating the case for global warming. In fact, the article that spawned this discussion points out that there are still more unknown variables than known facts. Take this quote from the article:
This article is actually much more honest than most in that it points out the basic assumption in the researcher's hypothesis. The researchers "assume" that CO2 levels are the cause of the higher temperatures and not the result of higher temperatures. Despite the stated problems with the research the paper goes on to paint an extremely grim picture of our future world, and goes as far as to suggest possible (drastic) remedies for the high CO2 concentrations. The reason for this is obvious. Far more money is spent on research that promises to "save the world" than is spent on more mundane topics.
The folks writing this paper want their government to sponsor more expensive artic expeditions, and so they can't just say that global temperature and CO2 levels are highly related. Instead they have to predict catastrophe.
Microsoft is pushing XML for two reasons. The first reasons is that pushing XML for Office documents means that they can force their customers to upgrade to the newest version. Right now Microsoft's biggest competitor in the office suite race isn't OpenOffice.org or Corel's PerfectOffice. Microsoft's biggest competitor in this space are old versions of their own MS Office suite. Microsoft is desperate to move folks that are currently using Office 97 or Office 2000 to their newest offering. The easiest way to force people to migrate to the newest version of MS Office is to monkey with the document format. If older versions of MS Office can't open the newer files, then the folks on the old versions have a problem. When Office 97 came out Microsoft simply changed the binary format. This made enough of Microsoft's big customers upset enough that Microsoft can't really pull that trick again. By mixing the document format change with something that some people actually want (easily integratable XML formats), Microsoft can introduce a new document format without upsetting their big customers.
Microsoft's reasoning behind embracing XML as a format for their web services initiative is similar. Microsoft saw that Java was running away with the enterprise application market, and the execs at Microsoft knew that they had to do something to compete in this arena. One of the easiest ways to do this was to adopt some of the same standards that folks like IBM were adopting. Microsoft knew that unless their .NET servers could talk to Java application servers that they didn't have a chance, and so they opted for compatibility. For similar reasons Microsoft also opened up the specs for large portions of their .NET architecture (which is what spawned Mono). Microsoft knew that customers like standards, and since Microsoft was having to compete with Java for developers it realized that one of the cheapest ways to differentiate .NET from Java was to make it an open standard.
Basically Microsoft is only open to the extent that being open is good for business. Microsoft knows from long experience that closed source and opaque formats generally produce higher profit margins, but in certain key areas Microsoft is so interested in enticing buyers that it is willing to sweeten the deal with a bit of open document formats and network protocols. Think of XML as Microsoft's 0% financing or two-for-one sale pricing and you won't be too far off the mark.
Fah, ratings work for blogs the same way that they do for "regular" news sources. After all, who cares if a blog is full of crap if no one reads it. Both network television and the popular blogs that are to some extent supplanting network television are financed by advertising revenue, and so they get paid for precisely the same way.
In the end the only real difference between a popular blog and network television is that it takes the networks months to run Dan Rather when he fabricates a story. In the blog world there is far more competition, and far more choices. Blogs that have a reputation for innacuracy lose readers in a hurry.
That's actually the wrong question when it comes to OEM installs. After all, if you buy the OEM version of Windows it doesn't come with any support at all. Microsoft has been very successful at offloading Windows support onto the systems builders.
That's why, for the system builder, Linux is a clear win. It lowers their overall cost of the machine without significantly raising their support costs (especially now that Intel is willing to help make sure that the hardware is Linux compatible). As an added bonus a large percentage of the folks that currently buy Linux on their machines later go on to put a pirated version of Windows on the machine. For the system builder this means that they don't have to worry about support *at all*.
Basically preloading Linux allows systems builders to lower the overall price of the hardware they sell, and for Intel that's a definite win. The lower the overall system price the more hardware Intel can sell.
The problem with software patents is that they don't really protect "the little guy," at least not if the little guy actually writes software.
Let's say, for example, that your small company gets a patent on some cool idea and creates a software product based around this idea. Now, let's further speculate that your idea becomes the next web browser, the money starts rolling in, and Microsoft announces plans to create a similar product.
Your company is safe because it has a patent, right?
Wrong, because chances are good that your company infringes on all sorts of patents that Microsoft has, including stupid patents like the double click and the isNot operator. So the Microsoft folks show up with a stack of papers three feet thick detailing all of the ways in which your product violates their patents. Now, theoretically you could fight Microsoft, but the reality is that the litigation could easily cost you hundreds of millions of dollars, and there is a good chance that you would lose on at least some of the patent infringement charges.
So what do you do? You cross license your patents with Microsoft, and you probably end up paying Microsoft some money because they have more patents than you do. After all, you still want to be able to sell your product.
The only case in which patents help "the little guy" is in those cases where the little company doesn't actually write software. Microsoft (or IBM, or Sun, or whoever) can't put pressure to cross license patents on companies like Eolas, because Eolas doesn't actually have any products.
In the real world all patents do to "the little guy" is force up his development overhead. This gives the larger development firms a distinct advantage. They already have patents that they can cross-license, but you don't. This allows the large software houses the ability to shut down smaller shops essentially at will. How many small companies can afford to litigate against IBM or Microsoft?
Now, if you want to live in a world where the little guys have to satisfy themselves thinking up patentable ideas instead of actually writing software, that's fine. It's not where I want to live, however.
Sure applications can be ported to Solaris with relatively little pain if you know what you are doing. However, how many of the Windows developers that are currently shifting to Linux really know what they are doing with UNIX. To these UNIX newbies every difference between Linux and Solaris will seem like a very big deal.
Where Linux wins is that it has much broader hardware support. Developers and systems administrators can run Linux on their desktop without purchasing special (read expensive) Sun hardware. Newbie UNIX developers are going to feel a lot more comfortable running the same OS on their server as they do on their desktop (they're used to that). Not to mention the fact that choosing Linux means that you can get hardware and service from any number of sources. Sun's hardware and support may be great, but it's also fairly expensive. Microsoft has shown us for years that developer desktops are a very important commodity.
Even the most paranoid of developers will feel more comfortable with an all-Linux arrangement than they did with an all-Microsoft solution. After all, they'll know that they can switch to Solaris if they need to (or HP-UX, or AIX, or possibly even Windows if they used the right Linux tools). Just because you *can* switch doesn't mean that you will.
Besides, even if Solaris 10 made some serious strides, I wouldn't be one bit surprised to see Linux outperform it handily in most workloads. A lot of work has gone into making Linux work well on commodity hardware. Solaris simply hasn't had that sort of testing yet.
When push comes to shove Linux has a lot of momentum, and you can bet that the folks at IBM, Dell, HP, and the large bulk of whitebox server vendors aren't going to be pushing Solaris boxes. Linux also has the developer base, and the desktop compatibility. What Solaris has is a lot of customers that, over the last few years, have been pretty keen on getting away from Solaris and onto Linux.
My prediction is that a Free Solaris doesn't even cause a momentary dip in Linux adoption.
That's funny, I don't think that I have ever met a Canadian or a Mexican that wanted to be referred to as an "American."
The whole USian (or whatever) is nothing more than a big fat crock of @#$%! More people refer to themselves as "Earthlings" than refer to themselves as being "from the American continent." In fact, I doubt that you can think of one person on the entire planet (who isn't a /. troll) that is confused by the term "American" referring to a citizen of the United States of America.
Heck, the English translation of the formal name for Mexico is the United States of Mexico. So in the surrealistic fantasy world where U.S. citizens are USians then Mexican citizens could be USians as well (since you are speaking in English).
Long story short, the English language doesn't parse like Python or Perl. There are exceptions big enough to drive a boat through. You can spend all day pointing out inconsistencies but no one with any friends is likely to care.
Exactly. I would much rather have all the smart and ambitious people come to America. In todays economy I have to compete with them one way or the other. I would just as soon that their house didn't cost two orders of magnitude less than mine.
Good hell. You should try reading the article before you post. Patrick did go to the doctor. In fact, he went to lots of doctors, and they all did precisely the same (wrong) thing. Patrick's research (and Google) was what finally provided the clues that lead to proper diagnosis.
You should definitely consult a doctor, but anyone with a serious medical issue that doesn't take the time to do some personal research is a fool. Doctors have a lot to do, and they don't get paid for research. The average individual with an Internet connection has access to more medical information than even the most well-connected doctors did 10 years ago. In this case there was almost no chance that the average local doctor would have any experience with this sort of infection. Heck, most of the information available on the Net is about postmortem cases where the patient died because the doctor misdiagnosed the illness.
The RIAA goes after folks "distributing" their copyrighted works because that what triggers the copy protection laws in the U.S. Basically U.S. laws were designed around stopping organized crime for making and selling counterfeit copies of popular albums, books, etc. The laws assumed that expensive equipment was needed to make these copies, and that a sophisticated system of underground marketing was needed to get the copies into legitimate channels. Because of this the penalties for distributing copyrighted material illegally are very very harsh. After all, the people that used to engage in the illegal distribution of copyrighted material were the most pernicious sort of organized criminal.
These laws are seem somewhat ridiculous in an age where a 14 year-old girl with a $300 computer and a broadband connection can distribute gigabytes of copyrighted material, but that's how things work. Fortunately for filesharers the RIAA has not been keen on sending folks to prison.
The reason that there aren't any end user lawsuits concerning patents that Windows infringes is that the patent holders tend to go after Microsoft directly. Microsoft is currently facing over 30 patent infringement suits. Most patent holders are more interested in going after Microsoft's cash hoard than in penny-ante attacks on Microsoft's customers.
Microsoft finally realized that since they were going to bear the brunt of the patent infringement lawsuits that they might as well formalize the arrangement. After all, some of Microsoft's customers apparently think that this is a big deal.
Fah, Best Buy had a problem with customers buying an item, applying for the rebate, returning the item, and then coming back into the store to buy the same item after it was marked down as a return.
If that's not a devil customer, I am not sure who would qualify.
What Best Buy has done is change their practices to cut down on the amount of outright abuse. Personally, mail in rebates tick me off, so I am not about to spend my money at Best Buy, but I can understand why they would change their policy. I would also bet that most people won't even notice the difference. The only people that care are the Devil Customers that were abusing Best Buys' policies.
Microsoft has been trying to "clean its plate" for some time now, and yet lawsuits keep piling up like snow in Alaska. The reason for this is simple. Microsoft has a lot of money (they make a good target), and they have made some less than stellar decisions in the past. Add to that the fact that they are essentially a convicted monopolist and you have a situation that allows for a lot of softball lawsuits with the potential for a huge payout.
$536 million might be chump change for Microsoft, but it's a very healthy sum for Novell. Novell's Linux initiatives require an order of magnitude less R&D investment than Microsoft's initiatives. Novell can make this money go a very long way.
Microsoft settled because they are afraid of what would happen if this went to court. Microsoft has a lot of skeletons in its closet, and Novell's Netware went from having 70+% of the market to having considerably less than that. If a jury found that Microsoft had taken that marketshare illegally then the potential punishment could be very very substantial.
Yes, but it is fair to compare Novell Linux win Windows + MS Office. Linux gets the nod because I can deploy it in a thin client configuration for $59 a seat. Unfortunately, Microsoft's thin client solutions don't come anywhere close to touching that. 70 Linux thin clients means 70 less hard drives that I have to worry about, and it also guarantees that upgrading the overall system is as easy as pie. Software updates are made to a handful of machines, and when I want to upgrade the hardware I simply swap out the server and everyone's desktop runs a little faster.
OpenOffice.org gets the nod because it would puts a full-fledged, mostly MS compatible, office suite on every node in the plant for no additional price.
In short, you put Linux thin clients on the floor because the applications available for Linux are "good enough" and the potential savings are tremendous.
Novell is going after the "low hanging fruit" in much the same way that Red Hat's biggest efforts to date have been in convincing Solaris customers to switch to Linux. What's the sense in attacking Microsoft outright when you can make more money somewhere else.
The folks at Novell know that over the long haul an inexpensive, secure, and stable no-frills desktop is going to make a market for itself just about everywhere. However, Novell is absolutely right in pointing out that for right now the obvious application is in locations where a minimal set of applications is needed.
To give you an example, I used to work in a french fry factory. The factory had about 90 PCs, but less than 20 of these PCs were used by office workers. The rest of the PCs were out in the plant and were used mostly to let people out on the floor view data. The machines out on the plant floor could easily have been running Linux, and it would have saved the company a substantial sum of money.
Novell knows that there are lots of businesses like that french fry plant, and they also know that in the long run once these locations get a little bit of experience with Linux clients that essentially run themselves that the IT folks are going to start looking at ways to migrate the remaining office workers to Linux. More importantly, when they buy or build new applications they will be far more likely to create the applications in a way that is portable to Linux.
Which brings us to the second part of Novell's master plan. Novell plans to use Mono to entice existing .NET developers into creating cross-platform applications.
I agree that gathering this data is difficult, but it is certainly not impossible. There are plenty of gay and lesbian couples that are currently raising their own children, and there is also the experiment in the Netherlands. Your problem is that you want to elevate gay marriage to an equal status as traditional marriage without first insuring that gay marriage is as beneficial to society. Face it, gay marriage is an unproven social experiment at this point. Throwing innocent children into the experiment is unethical. It would be like testing new medicines on three-year-old orphans because you are "pretty sure" that the medicine is going to work. I don't want to skew the adoption laws one bit. I simply want to maintain the current status quo. It is the gays and lesbians that want to change the laws.
First of all, at least in America it is much easier to get married than divorced in all but the most trivial of amicable divorces. My father's an attorney, and he no longer does divorces as they can be very messy. Say what you will, but the pains of a divorce is definitely an incentive to try and make a marriage work. In the Netherlands, on the other hand it is much easier to get a divorce. In fact, the translated Dutch paper on the subject that I read referred to them as "flash divorces." You can pretend that this doesn't effect the divorce rate in the Netherlands, but the actual statistics prove otherwise. For whatever reason the Dutch are far more likely to divorce than they were ten years ago.
Now, the reason that I talk about the benefits of marriage versus the benefits of cohabiting is that most of the research that I have looked at over the last few days specifically mentions cohabiting couples. Statistically cohabiting couples fare only slightly better than single mothers in their parenting abilities. Even stepparents do better on average. I imagine that part of this is that it is difficult to pick out single mothers with lots of erstwhile partners from folks like your Dutch friends that simply have an aversion to traditional marriage. It is possible that the Dutch have invented a new type of family unit that is as capable and stable as the traditional family, but if they haven't then the Dutch society is going to be faced with a lot of problems in the next few years.
That's our biggest difference of opinion. I believe that if families truly are more beneficial to society than other unions that the society has an obligation to promote traditional families for the good of everyone. So far both the hard evidence and the popular sentiment are in my corner (at least in the U.S.). To counteract this the gay and lesbian coalitions are either going to cough up some evidence of their own, or they are going to have to find some way to sway public opinion in the absence of that data.