I won't consider it serious competition for Bochs and VirtualPC until it can run on one architecture, emulate a different architecture and run an OS for the emulated architecture. Those two are by no means X86-only products like Plex86, VMWare and this new one.
Last time I was involved in that kind of testing, we found out that our code worked as designed (yay!).
Unfortunately, we also found out that the application server engine we'd written it for had some critical bugs buried very deeply, that had never shown up because no one had ever tried to do anything quite that stressful with it.:(
Oh well.
Also in Hawaii. After a while you just get used to being able to see waterfalls and the ocean and mountains and stuff, and kinda forget that other places have billboards blocking "the view."
So what's the incentive to grow bigger? You end up paying more and more and getting less and less profit if you keep growing. You get to 15% market share and realize that you won't be making much money at all soon.
Well... You're right that there's a point beyond which it's illogical to continue. But as my simple math (described over here) showed me, it's further from 15% than you think.:) (At least if % market share = % revenue share)
Server Platforms (Windows Server 2003, SQL Server, etc.)
CE/Mobile (Windows Mobile, etc.)
Business Software (Great Plains etc.)
Home & Entertainment (Xbox, Media Center, etc)
MSN
The only divisions that consistently turn a profit (a couple billion a quarter each) are Client and Information Worker. Server Platforms is usually brings in a profit of some hundred million each quarter, but sometimes (like the first quarter of fiscal 2004, if I recall) loses money. The other four combined lose something like $250 million every quarter.
Microsoft gets something like 90% of its profits from selling Windows client OSes and Office. If Microsoft expects to survive (or you expect it to do so) in some emerging segment while the "PC OS Market" goes away, it's going to have to do a lot better in those other segments.
Well, actually... if there is a direct correlation between percentage market share, percentage of the overall money being gotten in the market, and percentage tax rate, there is incentive to gain market share... until you hit 50%.
A couple minutes with a spreadsheet will show that 1 - 1% is.99, and 99 - 99% is also 0.99... but 50 - 50% is 25! It's a bell curve, and there's definitely a sweet spot there.
So under that "extreme" example, you could have two major competitors in any market operating at, or close to, maximum profitability, while a monopoly would basically self-destruct. Perhaps it's a little smarter than some people think.
Of course, the numbers could be adjusted to move the "sweet spot" higher or lower. You could make it so diminishing returns kicked in if a company had more than, say, 75% market share, so there could still be one big player, but leave room for smaller ones too. Or you could put the sweet spot at 33% or even 25%, thus encouraging the existence of 3 or 4 fairly evenly matched competitors in a market.
But yeah, Cringely's right that it won't happen. The folks who create taxes don't have much incentive to do that, considering who's lining their pockets, and besides, the math might be too hard for them.;)
I live on an island. I do underwater photography. I have a waterproof enclosure for my camera, but the only other waterproof thing I have is a watch. I wouldn't at all mind having more truly waterproof (not just water-resistant) stuff. It'd save me the trouble of remembering to put things down before I dive in...;)
The local university here is big on marine biology... make it go for 3 hours at 30 meters, and maybe we can talk. 30 minutes at one meter? Nah, folks will keep using those waterproof clipboard thingies.
A lot of people have heard of buy.com, and when buymusic.com launched in July of last year - just a few months after the iTunes store launched, and considerably before Napster's relaunch or most of the other things, it did so with plenty of fanfare, and plenty of coverage, even right here on Slashdot. In fact, it's beenmentionedfivemoretimes in article abstracts between then and this story - and that's just the Slashdot coverage it's gotten. Yes, that pales in comparison to the amount of coverage the iTunes store has gotten, but if buymusic.com had been better-implemented and perceived as less of a ripoff of the iTunes store, and had actually released some numbers here and there, it might be the #2 store today (at least) instead of Napster.
So if the iPod were a wind-up toy witha clever hierarchial user interface, painstakingly crafted by Swiss watchmakers, you'd consider it patentable, yet because it's electronic, and the user interface is controlled by firmware, it's not?
At this point in history, the vast majority of patents that are filed draw upon previous inventions. Very few people think far enough outside the box to come up with things that bear no resemblance to those which have come before, and share no parts with them. Does that mean inventions that combine or enhance existing technologies and methods in ways that have not been seen before should be barred from being patented? Some Slashdotters seem, from their knee-jerk reactions, to hold that view.
Perhaps if I went searching through old articles, I would find someone posting that the Segway wasn't worthy of being patented, because it used gyroscopes, handlebars, wheels, and even a grip-throttle - all of which everyone knew had been around for ages in other devices.
Perhaps a flying car wouldn't be worthy because it used parts from cars and airplanes, both of which have been around in some form or another for a hundred years.
See where I'm going here?
If you take enough different ideas or things from enough different places, and put them together in a way that hasn't been seen before, and the result is something that significantly improves upon what had been seen before, to the extent that people look at it and say, "Wow, that's sure new and different," you've basically had an original idea. Sure, you've been standing on the shoulders of giants - but so has everyone else.
I've been an ATT customer since 2000 (when they borged Honolulu Cellular). I was on their TDMA network (which worked fine) until a year ago, when I switched to their new GSM one.
Switching was a royal pain in the ass, since they had totally replicated everything staffing-wise and billing-wise and all that, for the new network, and at that point, folks still weren't very clear on where to forward existing customers who wanted to switch. Eventually, though, I got a nice shiny Nokia 3650 (at no small expense).
At that point in time, I was told up front that GSM was pretty much available only in and around the biggest town in the area (where, conveniently, I live), and that service would be coming soon further out (where TDMA service already was, and had been, available). Okay, no problem.
10 months passed. I noticed that there my coverage wasn't nearly as good as it had been. More than about 10 miles from town in any direction and I had no service. I went for a long bike ride, spent 7 hours incommunicado, and my wife was calling hospitals to see if my body had been brought in.
Why did all this happen? Simple. The Nokia 3650 is a 900/1800/1900MHz "World Phone." Here in town, ATT's tower has GSM on 850/1900MHz... everywhere outside town it's 850MHz only. Whoops, ATT.
Oh, and of course you can go to any ATT kiosk or store in town and buy a 3650 to this day. The new 3620 (850/1900MHz, yay!) isn't yet available in stores... but it will be, soon... I hope...
Huge numbers of Macintosh users run Microsoft products (MSIE, Office v.X, Virtual PC, etc.). Some of us even run Windows under Virtual PC, and need to keep our Windows instances up to date security-wise. Last time I ran Windows Update on the Windows XP instance I have on my iBook, it came back with something like 35 things it needed to download. And I'm sure the same folks who let us know that a vulnerability doesn't affect our Macs would let us know if one did, too.
I am reminded of a particularly accursed box... a 266MHz Dell (which was right around the time that Dells started to not suck completely) running Windows 9x (which seems to have been one of those nice OSes that thought Intel's "idle cycle" processor cooling idea was silly) and WinProxy. It worked well, for a little while at a time. The box frequently overheated and crashed. Once Linux and ipchains were installed, it just sat there and worked.
The 3G phones can be rate throttled to take care of congestion, resulting in ass-quality calls, which lets AT&T put off getting new towers forever. And they *do*. They lied to me about "improving the network shortly" for most of a year before I called the local tower owners to find out where AT&T was expanding their presence. None of them were, and when I took this to AT&T, they not only let me avoid the $200 contract termination fee, but bought back the phone and refunded me for 10 months of service.
I don't know about the phone tech end of that, but I have a complaint in with the BBB after 10 months of trying to use a 900/1800/1900MHz phone I purchased from AT&T because they had an 850/1900Mhz tower in my town and said they'd be rolling out service in the surrounding area "soon." They rolled it out, all right - on 850Mhz ONLY. So I can use my mobile phone several miles in each direction, then I'm SOL. If I'm as lucky as you, I'll be pretty darn happy.
Maybe Cingular will make things suck less. Hey, it could happen!
very good point. Since where I live is visible from here on the rare clear night, we've got streetlights with shades to keep the light from going "up" too much and all that... so yeah, that could be a slight problem.
I'm not sure how bright the glow would be, of course...
Looks to me like as long as I have a 3650 that works with one cell tower within about 60 miles of me, I'm screwed, period, regardless of what I did or didn't get in writing.;) And I'm sure there are people who would say that I am, anyway, as an ATT customer. *shrug*
But it's only been a little while since I sent that note to the BBB about it, so... we shall see.
Reverse rice rockets are the best... that's what made the Dodge Omni GLH-S so cool. A clunky-looking little econobox that ran in the low teens at the drag strip.
Here in Hawaii, there are tons of "riced" Hondas and other imports (and "dumbestics" too, I've seen some truly horrible things done to a Dodge Stratus sedan). I've got a bog-standard totally-stock Accord, but maybe someday I'll get one of those gizmos that makes fusion from tiny bubbles (hey, wasn't that a Don Ho song??) and a flux capacitor, and...
My wife took her Pro Keyboard to work, since she couldn't stand the craptastic one on the PC there. Works fine. I suspect the volume up, down, and off keys, eject key and F13-F16 on my G5's keyboard would be confusing to a PC, though.
Oh, and since prockcore didn't spell it out, the "Command" key is the one with the apple and the cloverleaf on it, if anyone's confused.
Astoundingly, "shadowpuppetporn.com" is still available.
I wonder if I can work out a way to charge admission to my front yard...
Since shadowing requires the object casting the shadow to be between the light source and the viewer, this might be an interesting material for (cast, pre-stressed) roof panels. It'd let light in during the day, and at night, any lights inside, probably being near the ceiling anyway, would give the roof a glow.
There've already been some good suggestions made that fit into this category - generators, natural gas/propane, and so on. But maybe it's time to set up a cage full of a BIG number of lead-acids, get a commercial-grade inverter that'll spit out nice clean electricity, and the necessary bits to handle inputs from the grid, a generator, photovoltaic panels, wind turbines, or anything else you can get there.
With my little 1000VA APC toy, I'm already at the point where my powerhungry G5 can be the only thing on in the neighborhood at times... now I just want it to last longer.:)
If we're talking about open-source alternatives to Mac OS X, we could also talk about open-source stuff that's relatively compatible with Mac OS X at the non-GUI level, and runs on x86.:) Maybe they could keep all the Xeons in their render farm, and just install Darwin on them, then the back-end apps could run on both Xeon and Mac.
I have a 3650 too. Yeah, it's a nice convergence, but it's NOT a serious gaming platform. (Though I do have the Series 60 version of Frodo, the Commodore 64 emulator, which I use to play the C-64 versions of Pac-Man and Q-Bert on it!;)
(And actually I'm in a bit of a spat with ATT, since they sold me a 3650 on the grounds that GSM was available in my town and "coming soon" out in the countryside... and then rolled it out in the countryside on 850MHz. I need the new 3620 instead.
Slashdot Mirror
I won't consider it serious competition for Bochs and VirtualPC until it can run on one architecture, emulate a different architecture and run an OS for the emulated architecture. Those two are by no means X86-only products like Plex86, VMWare and this new one.
Last time I was involved in that kind of testing, we found out that our code worked as designed (yay!). Unfortunately, we also found out that the application server engine we'd written it for had some critical bugs buried very deeply, that had never shown up because no one had ever tried to do anything quite that stressful with it. :(
Oh well.
Also in Hawaii. After a while you just get used to being able to see waterfalls and the ocean and mountains and stuff, and kinda forget that other places have billboards blocking "the view."
- Client (Windows XP)
- Information Worker (Office)
- Server Platforms (Windows Server 2003, SQL Server, etc.)
- CE/Mobile (Windows Mobile, etc.)
- Business Software (Great Plains etc.)
- Home & Entertainment (Xbox, Media Center, etc)
- MSN
The only divisions that consistently turn a profit (a couple billion a quarter each) are Client and Information Worker. Server Platforms is usually brings in a profit of some hundred million each quarter, but sometimes (like the first quarter of fiscal 2004, if I recall) loses money. The other four combined lose something like $250 million every quarter.Microsoft gets something like 90% of its profits from selling Windows client OSes and Office. If Microsoft expects to survive (or you expect it to do so) in some emerging segment while the "PC OS Market" goes away, it's going to have to do a lot better in those other segments.
A couple minutes with a spreadsheet will show that 1 - 1% is .99, and 99 - 99% is also 0.99 ... but 50 - 50% is 25! It's a bell curve, and there's definitely a sweet spot there.
So under that "extreme" example, you could have two major competitors in any market operating at, or close to, maximum profitability, while a monopoly would basically self-destruct. Perhaps it's a little smarter than some people think.
Of course, the numbers could be adjusted to move the "sweet spot" higher or lower. You could make it so diminishing returns kicked in if a company had more than, say, 75% market share, so there could still be one big player, but leave room for smaller ones too. Or you could put the sweet spot at 33% or even 25%, thus encouraging the existence of 3 or 4 fairly evenly matched competitors in a market.
But yeah, Cringely's right that it won't happen. The folks who create taxes don't have much incentive to do that, considering who's lining their pockets, and besides, the math might be too hard for them. ;)
I live on an island. I do underwater photography. I have a waterproof enclosure for my camera, but the only other waterproof thing I have is a watch. I wouldn't at all mind having more truly waterproof (not just water-resistant) stuff. It'd save me the trouble of remembering to put things down before I dive in... ;)
The local university here is big on marine biology... make it go for 3 hours at 30 meters, and maybe we can talk. 30 minutes at one meter? Nah, folks will keep using those waterproof clipboard thingies.
A lot of people have heard of buy.com, and when buymusic.com launched in July of last year - just a few months after the iTunes store launched, and considerably before Napster's relaunch or most of the other things, it did so with plenty of fanfare, and plenty of coverage, even right here on Slashdot. In fact, it's been mentioned five more times in article abstracts between then and this story - and that's just the Slashdot coverage it's gotten. Yes, that pales in comparison to the amount of coverage the iTunes store has gotten, but if buymusic.com had been better-implemented and perceived as less of a ripoff of the iTunes store, and had actually released some numbers here and there, it might be the #2 store today (at least) instead of Napster.
So if the iPod were a wind-up toy witha clever hierarchial user interface, painstakingly crafted by Swiss watchmakers, you'd consider it patentable, yet because it's electronic, and the user interface is controlled by firmware, it's not?
Perhaps if I went searching through old articles, I would find someone posting that the Segway wasn't worthy of being patented, because it used gyroscopes, handlebars, wheels, and even a grip-throttle - all of which everyone knew had been around for ages in other devices.
Perhaps a flying car wouldn't be worthy because it used parts from cars and airplanes, both of which have been around in some form or another for a hundred years.
See where I'm going here?
If you take enough different ideas or things from enough different places, and put them together in a way that hasn't been seen before, and the result is something that significantly improves upon what had been seen before, to the extent that people look at it and say, "Wow, that's sure new and different," you've basically had an original idea. Sure, you've been standing on the shoulders of giants - but so has everyone else.
Switching was a royal pain in the ass, since they had totally replicated everything staffing-wise and billing-wise and all that, for the new network, and at that point, folks still weren't very clear on where to forward existing customers who wanted to switch. Eventually, though, I got a nice shiny Nokia 3650 (at no small expense).
At that point in time, I was told up front that GSM was pretty much available only in and around the biggest town in the area (where, conveniently, I live), and that service would be coming soon further out (where TDMA service already was, and had been, available). Okay, no problem.
10 months passed. I noticed that there my coverage wasn't nearly as good as it had been. More than about 10 miles from town in any direction and I had no service. I went for a long bike ride, spent 7 hours incommunicado, and my wife was calling hospitals to see if my body had been brought in.
Why did all this happen? Simple. The Nokia 3650 is a 900/1800/1900MHz "World Phone." Here in town, ATT's tower has GSM on 850/1900MHz... everywhere outside town it's 850MHz only. Whoops, ATT.
Oh, and of course you can go to any ATT kiosk or store in town and buy a 3650 to this day. The new 3620 (850/1900MHz, yay!) isn't yet available in stores... but it will be, soon... I hope...
I run Windows XP Pro on an *emulated* 266MHz PC, 384MB of RAM. (That's in Virtual PC on an iBook G3-500). It... works.
I am reminded of a particularly accursed box... a 266MHz Dell (which was right around the time that Dells started to not suck completely) running Windows 9x (which seems to have been one of those nice OSes that thought Intel's "idle cycle" processor cooling idea was silly) and WinProxy. It worked well, for a little while at a time. The box frequently overheated and crashed. Once Linux and ipchains were installed, it just sat there and worked.
Maybe Cingular will make things suck less. Hey, it could happen!
I'm not sure how bright the glow would be, of course...
But it's only been a little while since I sent that note to the BBB about it, so... we shall see.
Here in Hawaii, there are tons of "riced" Hondas and other imports (and "dumbestics" too, I've seen some truly horrible things done to a Dodge Stratus sedan). I've got a bog-standard totally-stock Accord, but maybe someday I'll get one of those gizmos that makes fusion from tiny bubbles (hey, wasn't that a Don Ho song??) and a flux capacitor, and...
Well, I can dream, can't I?
Oh, and since prockcore didn't spell it out, the "Command" key is the one with the apple and the cloverleaf on it, if anyone's confused.
I wonder if I can work out a way to charge admission to my front yard...
Since shadowing requires the object casting the shadow to be between the light source and the viewer, this might be an interesting material for (cast, pre-stressed) roof panels. It'd let light in during the day, and at night, any lights inside, probably being near the ceiling anyway, would give the roof a glow.
With my little 1000VA APC toy, I'm already at the point where my powerhungry G5 can be the only thing on in the neighborhood at times... now I just want it to last longer. :)
If we're talking about open-source alternatives to Mac OS X, we could also talk about open-source stuff that's relatively compatible with Mac OS X at the non-GUI level, and runs on x86. :) Maybe they could keep all the Xeons in their render farm, and just install Darwin on them, then the back-end apps could run on both Xeon and Mac.
I, for one, welcome our new mouse overlords. -Dan (shocked, shocked! that no one else said that already)
I have a 3650 too. Yeah, it's a nice convergence, but it's NOT a serious gaming platform. (Though I do have the Series 60 version of Frodo, the Commodore 64 emulator, which I use to play the C-64 versions of Pac-Man and Q-Bert on it! ;)
(And actually I'm in a bit of a spat with ATT, since they sold me a 3650 on the grounds that GSM was available in my town and "coming soon" out in the countryside... and then rolled it out in the countryside on 850MHz. I need the new 3620 instead.