For every Stephen King blockbuster there's hundreds of authors whose books barely sell. Many of those sales (maybe even most?) are to libraries. Won't this cause the libraries to stop buying so many books and wouldn't they most likely stop buying the lesser known, untried authors, and isn't this going to eventually hurt the book publishers more than they gain by it?
First, I think they ALL have a place, and I'd like to think that the multiple *NIX variants are actually a GOOD thing in that we can try multiple ideas and cross-pollinate and everybody improves. We should really all be on the same side.
However, I can give a real-world example here that illustrates why I'm in the Linux camp, at least slightly moreso than the *BSD camp.
My background is System V-ish. I started using UNIX with SCO, and have worked on AIX, NCR and Solaris systems, but not SunOS (though I readily admit I'm not a "guru"). Last year I was tasked by my employer to set up a NAT system so that we could re-route all our Customer Service employees machines through it and control what web sites they went to (in this case, none except the corporate web site). This was something I had little experience with, however, I wanted security so I downloaded OpenBSD and set about learning to use it.
It took all day to install on a 1 year old Dell P3/500. Once installed I found myself issuing commands that didn't work ("ps -ef", for example) or that didn't return what I expected. Not being familiar with the BSD area, I didn't know where to look for help, and what web pages I did find, didn't guide me quickly enough. A day and a half into the project we were no closer to finished than when we'd started, and the boss had promised HIS boss that we'd have it up within another day.
So I downloaded and installed RedHat. It went in flawlessly and I found the IP Masquerading How-To and followed it and was up in a few hours.
Now, I FULLY recognize that this was not a limitation of OpenBSD, but rather my own knowledge. Given more time, I could've made the BSD system work, and may even have been happier with it, but I didn't have the time, and the more System V-like environment provided by Linux made for an easier transition.
In fact, once I figured out "ps -aux" I tried it on my Linux box and was surprised to see that it worked there, too (it doesn't on the Suns at work). So it seems to be that at least one reason to use Linux is that it's tools work similarly to what you are used to, regardless of whether you come from BSD or SysV, whereas the BSD side is, naturally, not very SysV-like (a friend who has a BSD background phrases it differently. He says that "Linux takes the worst of SysV and BSD command syntax", but at least either syntax works!)
I make no comparisons of quality here, only state that when crunch time came I was able to use Linux to get the job done, and was unable to do the same with OpenBSD in the same timeframe.
Having said that, I still hope to experiment with the *BSD systems when there is less of a time crunch, but I wouldn't be surprised if many peoples first experiences are similar, BSD being more difficult to get started with, move to Linux and up and running very quickly (to be fair to the BSD folks, I had EXACTLY the same scenario with Solaris X86, which was very difficult to get running on hardware that RedHat autodetected and installed on with hardly any effort).
Ease of install, easily find support, large quantity of software that the user can install quickly and easily. These are ingredients to success (in fact, the exact ones Microsoft used).
First, it takes away one of the main tenets of Open Source, that being that "many eyes makes all bugs shallow". Perhaps someone not in that pay-for-play group could fix it faster?
Second, the idea of holding off announcing the bug until the patch is released is the same tactic we complain about Microsoft using. What if the patch takes two months, or longer? How upset would we be then?
Well, yeah, there's probably quite a few things like that, but it wasn't what he was talking about. He means really big servers, and a DNS server isn't really the same thing (unless, it's Microsofts DNS, in which case it's apparently REALLY hard to maintain, so maybe they SHOULD move it to Linux...)
You beat me to it. I was going to say grep. But I'll add another.
whois
At an ISP I worked for I wrote a simple little script to do a whois on every domain we believed we were hosting. The script would check the domain name servers listed in the whois database and let us know if someone had moved an account. We could do 500 domains in a few minutes (actually, I had to slow it down so Network Solutions didn't complain about too many requests in too short a time). We could also use it to monitor change requests that we had made by simply submitting a smaller input.
Sure, it's a niche application, but as an ISP it was something we did regularly and I could do it quickly, easily and without purchasing any third party apps in Linux. Before we did it in Linux the Jr Sysadmin-trainee would sit with a web browser for several days typing in the requests and noting the answers. With 10 minutes of effort I replaced 2 days of clicking "Back" and typing a new domain, with a script that ran in a half hour.
The Unix pros here will point out that that's a trivial application, it wouldn't qualify for posting to Freshmeat. But that's EXACTLY the point of UNIX (and by extension, Linux). It gives you the power to do what you need done, quickly and painlessly. We don't live with the limitations of Linux, we live with the freedom of Linux. There's a difference.
The problem is that "real" enterprise servers don't ever go down, even when they change the hardware.
(sigh) If only this were true. My Sun E1000 went down when Sun had to replace the PROMS for Y2K compatibility. My E450 went down when we had to add an additional SCSI backplane. I've even seen a mainframe go down (though, admittedly, that doesn't happen very often). Heck, in college, I even CAUSED a mainframe to go down (unintentionally, but I was not very popular for a while afterwards). I've seen Oracle crash. I've seen a Sun Kernel Panic, I've seen Windows NT BSOD (far too often).
But I understand your point that downtime on the really big servers is very very minimal. However, Linux is working it's way up to those servers. Linux works very reliably in the rackmount space, and the individual server space, and even the cluster space. We haven't made it to Mainframe-reliability Raised Floor Rooms yet, because those types of Enterprise situations have different requirements (as you state). But Windows NT isn't going to be up for decades, either, and certainly not while changing the hardware (hot-swappable SCSI drives excepted). With IBMs help, I wouldn't be surprised to see Linux get there in a few years, and significantly ahead of Microsoft.
Re:Freedom is sacrificed a little at a time
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Norway Bans Spam
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I don't think that would qualify as spam under any definition I know. It's clearly a specific email to a specific person.
Change it to a mass email to people you've never met or heard of and then it becomes spam. Even the Junk Fax law allows exceptions for people with whom you have a previous relationship. Companies can send you faxes if you've bought from them previously. They just can't send anything prior to you actually having contact with them in another medium (and in person certainly qualifies, even if it IS in a bookstore).
Heh, we must be on different lists. I get all the "How to Make $80,000...", but never get the teenage girls or college degrees. In fact, lately the only thing I get that ISN'T tools for creating more spam is cable converters or satellite dish ads. All word-for-word identical, from some random email address routed through Japan or Korea.
There is no reason to put an entrepreneur simply trying to promote his e-business in jail with hardened criminals.
Spoken like a true spammer. I agree that jail time is harsh, but significant fines are not. "Make Money Fast" is not an entrepeneur trying to promote his e-business. It's a get-rich-quick scam. Something like 90% of the spam is for tools or lists to create MORE spam. Ads for legitimate products or services are rare.
When the amount of spam a user receives exceeds the amount of real email they receive, email loses its value. Since we know that email is the "killer app" of the Internet, and that spam is destroying it, nobody (who isn't a spammer) can reasonably say that there's nothing wrong with spam and users should just delete the extra email they get.
The Dells we got at my last company had the entire "restore image" on a hidden partition on the hard drive. There's a hidden file ("ZZ.BAT") on the root of the C: Drive. Running that activates their imaging software (like Ghost but named something else, that I forget) and lets you restore the image to as it was when it shipped.
You do not need a CD to do this, you simply need to be able to access the C: drive (even if you have to boot from a floppy to do so). I never had a hard drive completely fail, I imagine that Dell would've simply overnighted us a new one if that had happened, since this was a corporate install.
Beta didn't succeed in the consumer market, but RIAA/MPAA had nothing to do with it. Beta still exists (and you can buy new Beta machines from Sony even today). Beta 1 units are still used in nearly every Television station around, though consumers never liked the Beta 1 format because the recording time was so short (higher quality=shorter recording time on the same length tape).
Beta is successful in other parts of the world (notably Japan). RIAA/MPAA want control of all markets (that's why we have Region Codes on DVD), not just the US. If they had killed Beta it wouldn't be the dominant (recordable) video format in Japan today.
Not all of us were children when Episode IV, V or VI came out. What made Star Wars special was that it was revolutionary. It was a SF film that was fun. It was self-consistent. It created the modern soundtrack. We'd never seen anything remotely like it. People would sit around and discuss background details because they were there. In SF previously, there was a tendency to show all the expensive gadgets for a lot of film time (they cost so much, they must be on film!) and for everything to look brand new (even Star Trek: The Motion Picture did this). Star Wars gave us a "lived-in" universe, with self consistent storyline, characters and yes, hero-myth retellings. It also didn't stop to preach or be obscure.
2001 was the pinaccle of the SF movie. Clarke has stated that if you saw 2001 once and understood it, then he failed. Star Wars was meant to be fun. It didn't pretend to grandeur, it wanted to be a Saturday Afternoon Matinee, done with modern filmmaking techniques.
Today, the lessons of Star Wars are understood. You don't see pristine white spaceships and brand-new equipment in all your movies anymore, and the camera rarely spends 20 minutes showing an effect just because the effect was expensive to create ("Wow! V'ger is BIG!").
Episode I, II and III cannot possibly revolutionize film, because Episodes IV, V and VI already did. It has nothing to do with "childhood experiences".
A computer is only as useful as the software that is on it. During the Home Computer Wars of the 80's, there were many different, incompatible computers, and developers often ported their software between them, adding or removing features as needed for the hardware. Some ports were better than others and some never happened at all. "Find the software you want to run, then buy the hardware that runs it" became the mantra of the day, prior to the a priori establishment of the IBM PC as a "standard".
Once the IBM AT became the defacto standard in 1985, hardware became a commodity. You could buy hardware from anybody and it would run DOS (and later Windows) and all applications. While the other computers still existed, the volume of software being developed for them diminished. Larger volumes of PC-compatible computers drew the developers to that larger market and they abandoned (nearly) all of the alternatives. Apple itself was nearly gone, except Microsoft propped it up for a while to ensure that they could point at Apple and remind people that they were not a monopoly.
It is not required to have 100% of a market to be a monopoly, only such a large portion of the market that you can dictate to others what they do. Microsoft used unethical tactics to eliminate competitors to MS-DOS, and did the same for Windows. Developers who wanted to sell into the 100 Million plus machine markets were forced to write for a Microsoft OS. Because the other markets were smaller, many orders of magnitude less software were written. Microsoft had attained "critical mass" where they no longer had to make their OS better, because their OS had all the applications. This is self-replicating. A new developer, seeking a profitable product, can write for the Mac, and sell a few million units, if he's incredibly successful, or sell 100 times as many in the Windows market, if he's moderately successful.
It's this mind-share that makes Microsoft a monopoly and puts the lie to your statement that "People use MS Products because they have freely chosen to". Most consumers, buying a home computer, walk into a store and are sold a Windows machine without ever once being given the opportunity to make a choice. Usually, if they are given a choice, it's something along the lines of "Ok, the software for the Mac is along these 2 rows, the software for Linux you have to download over the Internet, or you can buy any of the thousands of titles we have in the rest of this store if you buy a Windows machine".
They didn't buy Microsoft because they LIKED Microsoft. They bought it because there is no real choice. I'm writing this on a Windows NT machine (though I'm a UNIX Admin by profession) because my employer insists on Exchange and Outlook for corporate mail. I am being forced to use MS products, despite your claims to the contrary.
Many software titles that I wish to run, only run on Windows. There is no other platform that will run Everquest, so Verant is forcing me to use an MS product on my home gaming computer.
Not all of us have the strength of character of Richard Stallman to simply eliminate non-free software from our lives. Functionality that exists, not in any Microsoft product itself, but in an application that only runs on a Microsoft OS force you to make that choice over and over.
It's those decisions, that add up, over and over, that force people into running Microsoft products (not to mention that until the Anti-trust suit you couldn't BUY a computer from a major vendor without Windows installed, even if you didn't WANT Windows! Dell, Compaq, Gateway, ALL forced customers to pay for Windows. Even now, if you are a corporate customer with a site license for multiple copies of Windows, you have to pay for Windows that comes on the new machine (that you are going to erase) AND you have to pay (in most cases) for the use of the site license (that you'd already paid for).
Microsoft just recently announced the elimination of Volume Pricing for Windows 95, Windows 98 and Windows ME, beginning early 2001, forcing corporations to buy the more expensive Windows 2000, even if they don't need it.
Predatory pricing and forced installs DO happen. If you like MS products that's fine, but you can't ignore their anti-competitive behavior.
Microsoft was in the right place at the right time and made some products that made them successful (Excel rightfully pulled market dominance from Lotus 1-2-3). That doesn't mean that haven't abused their market position, engaged in predatory and anti-competitive tactics.
I WANT Microsoft to make Excel. I even want them to make Windows. What I don't want them to be able to do is pick a company at random and simply drive them out of business by including that companies technology in their base OS and claiming it can't be removed, so that the company has nobody to sell it's products to (remember when everybody had QEMM, because you needed it? Or how about Norton Utilities to defrag your hard drive? And we don't even want to talk about how they dealt with hard drive compression)!
On topic with the original subject, however, I don't think anybody will be successful in forcing Microsoft to adhere to open standards. They can't do Kerberos right and they have a long history of nodding and saying they are going to do just what you ask them to, and then doing something else. Microsoft WANTS vendor lockin, and they NEED it for their business model to work. And they will continue to fight being brought into a competitive marketplace with every tool at their disposal, including out and out lies and disregard for government orders.
Because most of the world's hunger problems are caused by things like this - inefficient use of resources and vast overconsumption by the First World, especially America.
Unfortunately, this isn't true. There's more than enough food to feed every man, woman and child in the world full healthy meals, every single day. And it's not that it's being eaten by us Americans that prevents poor starving people from having any. Don't forget, we have our poor, starving people too (we just like to pretend we don't).
It's not a zero-sum game, in that we can produce far more food than we can eat. If we were short on food then yes, it's conceivable that my eating that big steak might mean somebody else couldn't eat, and then I'd agree with you that perhaps I should feel guilty about it. But whether I eat that big, juicy, delicious steak or not, doesn't affect those poor, starving people in the world in the least. The problems are much more complex than that. If they weren't, we could solve the problem by shipping all the unused food (day old bread, out of date food, etc) to the poor.
The first, of course, is simple capitalism. The poor, starving people of the world don't have the funds to pay for food. This is one that both individuals and countries can resolve, if they find it in their hearts to want to.
The second is distribution. Getting the food to those poor, starving people is actually more complex yet. It's not as easy as writing a check, or even sending a ship full of food to their closest city. Remember the scandal in the 80's over all the food sent to Ethiopia and how little of it actually reached the people who needed it most?
And, as you get farther from First World civilization, the problems increase. Sure, you can set up a food bank and a shelter in Chicago and advertise and people will probably hear about it and come. But how do you get the word out to people who don't live in large communities or cities or towns? How does the small family out in the middle of nowhere, desperately trying to eke out a meager existence, learn that they could have free food if they only knew to travel 100 miles to the closest town? You or I eating less doesn't impact that problem in the slightest.
Wouldn't be the first time. When Commodore brought out the Amiga they gave Electronic Arts a huge sum of money to be one of the development houses to have titles ready when the Amiga shipped. They also stipulated that EA wouldn't release any of those titles for other platforms for a period of time (a year, if I recall). It's why you didn't see EA titles on the Mac, Atari ST or PC (and most of it was shovelware. Seven Cities of Gold was not technically difficult on any of those platforms!) EA was more than happy to engage in an exclusive license with CBM, and even touted it in ads of the day. I see no reason why they wouldn't be willing to do the same for Microsoft, a much bigger 800-pound gorilla than even Commodore was in it's heyday.
A friend of mine had one of those VCR-backup programs. It was a bad idea. We discovered, through trial and error, that you had to use a brand-new High Quality tape every time you wanted to back up. No recycling your old tapes. If you didn't use a brand new High Quality (no $3 tapes here, either), the error rate was so high that you couldn't retrieve anything. What good is a backup that you can't restore from?
While one VHS tape is cheaper than one Travan or 8mm or DLT or whatever, those other tapes are reusable for some time, having to buy a new VHS tape for every day (or week or however often you backup) added up to far more cost than using a regular tape drive, and the VCR backup/restore process was incredibly slow, so there was no upside other than initial cost (everybody has a VCR, right?).
M.U.L.E. is one of my all-time two favorite games (the other being Sid Meier's Civilization). I would gladly pay for a working version of M.U.L.E., but with Dani Buntens passing, this is exceptionally unlikely.
And you could play 4 players on EVERY C64, unlike the Atari version where you could only play 4 players on the models with 4 joystick ports. So there!
Re:The Author of this article just doesn't get it.
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The Future Of The GUI?
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As I think about it, I can't bring to mind ANY innovative design or software package that is really something only in linux and not preexistent in windoze or the mac world.
How about apt-get? I'd like to install some new package, don't have to know much about it, apt-get will get it, get anything it depends upon, and install it.
I know of nothing in the Windows or Mac worlds that can do that (Windows Update will only give you updates from Microsoft themselves, not for all applications). I don't think that's playing catch-up at all.
My PC doesn't have a floppy drive . . . I didn't use it. Ever.
Mine does and I just used it last week to flash the BIOS for my motherboard so that it now supports faster CPUs. BIOS updates cannot generally be done in Windows (and I wouldn't trust it in a DOS Emulation session in any UNIX, either). It is true that I could've copied the files to the Hard Drive, held down F8 at boot and got to the command prompt that way, but that functionality goes away in Windows NT or Windows ME.
It's just simpler to have a bootable DOS Floppy that loads NOTHING and lets you flash things without worrying about memory managers or something else trashing your system.
Of course, this is a non-issue with Macs, as Apples upgrade policy has always been "Buy a new one".
If it's illegal to take a product apart to figure out how it works, it becomes much more difficult to make a better one.
Yes, this seems obvious to US, but don't forget, the legal system is geared towards INCREASING competition, not reducing it. Anti-trust laws, and laws prohibiting collusion are there precisely to foster competition.
Ford and GM can't work together to make a (fill in part of car) precisely because the system WANTS the other to try to improve on the part that the first built. That's how we get innovation, and technological advance. Ford makes something, then GM tries to make a better one, so Ford has to try to make a better one yet. The consumer wins. It is not only legal for Ford to buy a Chevy and take it apart to see what GM is doing these days, it's encouraged.
DMCA does precisely the opposite. It makes competition more difficult, and it prevents innovation.
Sir Isaac Newton said, "If I have seen farther than other men, it is because I stood on the shoulders of giants". He was able to learn from those who preceded him, and take their work and extend it. DMCA stops that. We are putting barriers to knowledge exchange, precisely at a time in our history when our education system is recognized as in need of improvement.
When we were children, taking things apart and figuring out how they worked was encouraged, and a sign of intelligence. It enabled us to grow up to be the hackers and Engineers and make the technology that feeds this great economic boom. DMCA deprives that next generation of that start, and ensures that we will criminalize the very people we need most, young people who are curious and smart enough to make technology for the 21st Century.
Corporate profits should not stand in the way of education and the free sharing of knowledge.
What about WordPerfect? I think WordPerfect could easily replace Word for most companies. It comes in second mostly because of the "Microsoft made it, it must be best attitude" mentioned earlier. WordPerfect is not Open Source (or Free Software), but it IS a Linux application.
no Linux application can replace Outlook
Avoiding Outlook is one of my favorite pastimes, so I'm not concerned that we don't have it on Linux, but Evolution looks like it might replace Outlook fairly soon. In the meantime, there are MUCH better mail programs (though I'll grant you that those companies that use Outlook for Calendars/Scheduling will find that difficult to replace. Many companies simply use it for email, however, and it's trivial to replace in that role).
IE wouldn't render (completely) our corporate database-enabled web page, but would hang half way down, so our entire company used Netscape anyway. Netscape, Opera, Mozilla, Konquerer, there are many choices for companies that wish to allow Web Browsing.
I think it's a tremendous leap to move to Linux on the desktop today, and I would say you are probably right that it is not quite ready, but I agree with the original poster that many companies are becoming fed up with the forced-upgrade path Microsoft uses to generate revenue.
Want to install Exchange Server? "Oh, we've discontinued Exchange 5.5, you have to buy Exchange 2000 and to run it you HAVE to buy Windows 2000 in spite of the fact that your NT 4.0 server is running just fine". We wanted to add an additional SQL Server system, but found out that Microsoft pulled all the SQL Server 6.5 and 7.0 packages and nobody could sell us one, we had to wait for SQL Server 2000 and it would only run on Windows 2000, so now we had to upgrade a server (or build a new one). Then you have to look at the Primary Domain Controller, since a Win2K machine isn't happy with an NT 4 PDC, and so on and so on. It's THOSE continuous fees that companies are fed up with. The product we HAVE works great. We want another just like it, but we can't get it, we have to get it's newer replacement, but oh yeah, you have to upgrade all your other systems to interoperate now.
Sorry, just checked and the Office Pro upgrade is $329. That's still cheaper than $150 per year, and in my case, I DEFINITELY couldn't find $329 worth of improvement (I DO like the multiple clipboards, though).
The only thing that happens when your subscription expires is the ability to create new documents.
And modify existing documents. If you have, say, your resume, in Word 10, and next year you don't renew, but you DO change jobs, sorry, you can't modify that resume. You have to buy a new product to make a change to an existing document.
If you consider MS Office nowadays costs $600 or more, and a new version is released every 3 years, an annual subscription of $150 saves you money in the long run...
Nobody who owns a current version of MS Office has to pay full retail for the next version. There are upgrade versions. If you wish the new version, you pay that $150 and get the upgrade. I don't know about you, but I'd rather pay $150 every 3 years than every single year (or, not, as I was unable to find $150 worth of improvements in Office 2000, and so chose not to purchase it. My Office 97 works just fine still, regardless, unlike under the new scheme).
I didn't say voting was supposed to be hard, I said it wasn't supposed to be easy, contrasting it with hitting a thumbs up/thumbs down button on your TV remote. I was, in fact, referring to the entire voting process, including the trip to the polling station. I don't think it should be hard, I just think it should require a modicum of effort. More than ordering a pizza.
I don't disagree with you about the improvement involved in flipping a switch. That would improve accuracy and that's a good thing. You still have to show some initiative to vote, and that implies (though not necessarily accurately) that you showed some initiative to have a reason to vote the way you did.
As for anybodies job... the polls are open from 7 am to 7 pm. Very few people work all of those hours, and if you do, get an absentee ballot! They are easy to obtain (I don't know about your state, but here in Florida they send you a form well in advance of the election, all you have to do is send it back, you get an absentee ballot). I wouldn't mind seeing PDF files of absentee ballots on the net, since they still have to be matched up against voter records at the counting stage and duplicates could be eliminated then.
I do not believe (as Katz apparently does) that we should be voting from the comfort of our homes. We may be the laziest nation in the world, but that would be extreme.
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For every Stephen King blockbuster there's hundreds of authors whose books barely sell. Many of those sales (maybe even most?) are to libraries. Won't this cause the libraries to stop buying so many books and wouldn't they most likely stop buying the lesser known, untried authors, and isn't this going to eventually hurt the book publishers more than they gain by it?
However, I can give a real-world example here that illustrates why I'm in the Linux camp, at least slightly moreso than the *BSD camp.
My background is System V-ish. I started using UNIX with SCO, and have worked on AIX, NCR and Solaris systems, but not SunOS (though I readily admit I'm not a "guru"). Last year I was tasked by my employer to set up a NAT system so that we could re-route all our Customer Service employees machines through it and control what web sites they went to (in this case, none except the corporate web site). This was something I had little experience with, however, I wanted security so I downloaded OpenBSD and set about learning to use it.
It took all day to install on a 1 year old Dell P3/500. Once installed I found myself issuing commands that didn't work ("ps -ef", for example) or that didn't return what I expected. Not being familiar with the BSD area, I didn't know where to look for help, and what web pages I did find, didn't guide me quickly enough. A day and a half into the project we were no closer to finished than when we'd started, and the boss had promised HIS boss that we'd have it up within another day.
So I downloaded and installed RedHat. It went in flawlessly and I found the IP Masquerading How-To and followed it and was up in a few hours.
Now, I FULLY recognize that this was not a limitation of OpenBSD, but rather my own knowledge. Given more time, I could've made the BSD system work, and may even have been happier with it, but I didn't have the time, and the more System V-like environment provided by Linux made for an easier transition.
In fact, once I figured out "ps -aux" I tried it on my Linux box and was surprised to see that it worked there, too (it doesn't on the Suns at work). So it seems to be that at least one reason to use Linux is that it's tools work similarly to what you are used to, regardless of whether you come from BSD or SysV, whereas the BSD side is, naturally, not very SysV-like (a friend who has a BSD background phrases it differently. He says that "Linux takes the worst of SysV and BSD command syntax", but at least either syntax works!)
I make no comparisons of quality here, only state that when crunch time came I was able to use Linux to get the job done, and was unable to do the same with OpenBSD in the same timeframe.
Having said that, I still hope to experiment with the *BSD systems when there is less of a time crunch, but I wouldn't be surprised if many peoples first experiences are similar, BSD being more difficult to get started with, move to Linux and up and running very quickly (to be fair to the BSD folks, I had EXACTLY the same scenario with Solaris X86, which was very difficult to get running on hardware that RedHat autodetected and installed on with hardly any effort).
Ease of install, easily find support, large quantity of software that the user can install quickly and easily. These are ingredients to success (in fact, the exact ones Microsoft used).
Second, the idea of holding off announcing the bug until the patch is released is the same tactic we complain about Microsoft using. What if the patch takes two months, or longer? How upset would we be then?
Well, yeah, there's probably quite a few things like that, but it wasn't what he was talking about. He means really big servers, and a DNS server isn't really the same thing (unless, it's Microsofts DNS, in which case it's apparently REALLY hard to maintain, so maybe they SHOULD move it to Linux...)
whois
At an ISP I worked for I wrote a simple little script to do a whois on every domain we believed we were hosting. The script would check the domain name servers listed in the whois database and let us know if someone had moved an account. We could do 500 domains in a few minutes (actually, I had to slow it down so Network Solutions didn't complain about too many requests in too short a time). We could also use it to monitor change requests that we had made by simply submitting a smaller input.
Sure, it's a niche application, but as an ISP it was something we did regularly and I could do it quickly, easily and without purchasing any third party apps in Linux. Before we did it in Linux the Jr Sysadmin-trainee would sit with a web browser for several days typing in the requests and noting the answers. With 10 minutes of effort I replaced 2 days of clicking "Back" and typing a new domain, with a script that ran in a half hour.
The Unix pros here will point out that that's a trivial application, it wouldn't qualify for posting to Freshmeat. But that's EXACTLY the point of UNIX (and by extension, Linux). It gives you the power to do what you need done, quickly and painlessly. We don't live with the limitations of Linux, we live with the freedom of Linux. There's a difference.
But I understand your point that downtime on the really big servers is very very minimal. However, Linux is working it's way up to those servers. Linux works very reliably in the rackmount space, and the individual server space, and even the cluster space. We haven't made it to Mainframe-reliability Raised Floor Rooms yet, because those types of Enterprise situations have different requirements (as you state). But Windows NT isn't going to be up for decades, either, and certainly not while changing the hardware (hot-swappable SCSI drives excepted). With IBMs help, I wouldn't be surprised to see Linux get there in a few years, and significantly ahead of Microsoft.
Change it to a mass email to people you've never met or heard of and then it becomes spam. Even the Junk Fax law allows exceptions for people with whom you have a previous relationship. Companies can send you faxes if you've bought from them previously. They just can't send anything prior to you actually having contact with them in another medium (and in person certainly qualifies, even if it IS in a bookstore).
Heh, we must be on different lists. I get all the "How to Make $80,000...", but never get the teenage girls or college degrees. In fact, lately the only thing I get that ISN'T tools for creating more spam is cable converters or satellite dish ads. All word-for-word identical, from some random email address routed through Japan or Korea.
When the amount of spam a user receives exceeds the amount of real email they receive, email loses its value. Since we know that email is the "killer app" of the Internet, and that spam is destroying it, nobody (who isn't a spammer) can reasonably say that there's nothing wrong with spam and users should just delete the extra email they get.
The Dells we got at my last company had the entire "restore image" on a hidden partition on the hard drive. There's a hidden file ("ZZ.BAT") on the root of the C: Drive. Running that activates their imaging software (like Ghost but named something else, that I forget) and lets you restore the image to as it was when it shipped. You do not need a CD to do this, you simply need to be able to access the C: drive (even if you have to boot from a floppy to do so). I never had a hard drive completely fail, I imagine that Dell would've simply overnighted us a new one if that had happened, since this was a corporate install.
Beta is successful in other parts of the world (notably Japan). RIAA/MPAA want control of all markets (that's why we have Region Codes on DVD), not just the US. If they had killed Beta it wouldn't be the dominant (recordable) video format in Japan today.
2001 was the pinaccle of the SF movie. Clarke has stated that if you saw 2001 once and understood it, then he failed. Star Wars was meant to be fun. It didn't pretend to grandeur, it wanted to be a Saturday Afternoon Matinee, done with modern filmmaking techniques.
Today, the lessons of Star Wars are understood. You don't see pristine white spaceships and brand-new equipment in all your movies anymore, and the camera rarely spends 20 minutes showing an effect just because the effect was expensive to create ("Wow! V'ger is BIG!").
Episode I, II and III cannot possibly revolutionize film, because Episodes IV, V and VI already did. It has nothing to do with "childhood experiences".
Once the IBM AT became the defacto standard in 1985, hardware became a commodity. You could buy hardware from anybody and it would run DOS (and later Windows) and all applications. While the other computers still existed, the volume of software being developed for them diminished. Larger volumes of PC-compatible computers drew the developers to that larger market and they abandoned (nearly) all of the alternatives. Apple itself was nearly gone, except Microsoft propped it up for a while to ensure that they could point at Apple and remind people that they were not a monopoly.
It is not required to have 100% of a market to be a monopoly, only such a large portion of the market that you can dictate to others what they do. Microsoft used unethical tactics to eliminate competitors to MS-DOS, and did the same for Windows. Developers who wanted to sell into the 100 Million plus machine markets were forced to write for a Microsoft OS. Because the other markets were smaller, many orders of magnitude less software were written. Microsoft had attained "critical mass" where they no longer had to make their OS better, because their OS had all the applications. This is self-replicating. A new developer, seeking a profitable product, can write for the Mac, and sell a few million units, if he's incredibly successful, or sell 100 times as many in the Windows market, if he's moderately successful.
It's this mind-share that makes Microsoft a monopoly and puts the lie to your statement that "People use MS Products because they have freely chosen to". Most consumers, buying a home computer, walk into a store and are sold a Windows machine without ever once being given the opportunity to make a choice. Usually, if they are given a choice, it's something along the lines of "Ok, the software for the Mac is along these 2 rows, the software for Linux you have to download over the Internet, or you can buy any of the thousands of titles we have in the rest of this store if you buy a Windows machine".
They didn't buy Microsoft because they LIKED Microsoft. They bought it because there is no real choice. I'm writing this on a Windows NT machine (though I'm a UNIX Admin by profession) because my employer insists on Exchange and Outlook for corporate mail. I am being forced to use MS products, despite your claims to the contrary.
Many software titles that I wish to run, only run on Windows. There is no other platform that will run Everquest, so Verant is forcing me to use an MS product on my home gaming computer.
Not all of us have the strength of character of Richard Stallman to simply eliminate non-free software from our lives. Functionality that exists, not in any Microsoft product itself, but in an application that only runs on a Microsoft OS force you to make that choice over and over.
It's those decisions, that add up, over and over, that force people into running Microsoft products (not to mention that until the Anti-trust suit you couldn't BUY a computer from a major vendor without Windows installed, even if you didn't WANT Windows! Dell, Compaq, Gateway, ALL forced customers to pay for Windows. Even now, if you are a corporate customer with a site license for multiple copies of Windows, you have to pay for Windows that comes on the new machine (that you are going to erase) AND you have to pay (in most cases) for the use of the site license (that you'd already paid for).
Microsoft just recently announced the elimination of Volume Pricing for Windows 95, Windows 98 and Windows ME, beginning early 2001, forcing corporations to buy the more expensive Windows 2000, even if they don't need it.
Predatory pricing and forced installs DO happen. If you like MS products that's fine, but you can't ignore their anti-competitive behavior.
Microsoft was in the right place at the right time and made some products that made them successful (Excel rightfully pulled market dominance from Lotus 1-2-3). That doesn't mean that haven't abused their market position, engaged in predatory and anti-competitive tactics.
I WANT Microsoft to make Excel. I even want them to make Windows. What I don't want them to be able to do is pick a company at random and simply drive them out of business by including that companies technology in their base OS and claiming it can't be removed, so that the company has nobody to sell it's products to (remember when everybody had QEMM, because you needed it? Or how about Norton Utilities to defrag your hard drive? And we don't even want to talk about how they dealt with hard drive compression)!
On topic with the original subject, however, I don't think anybody will be successful in forcing Microsoft to adhere to open standards. They can't do Kerberos right and they have a long history of nodding and saying they are going to do just what you ask them to, and then doing something else. Microsoft WANTS vendor lockin, and they NEED it for their business model to work. And they will continue to fight being brought into a competitive marketplace with every tool at their disposal, including out and out lies and disregard for government orders.
It's not a zero-sum game, in that we can produce far more food than we can eat. If we were short on food then yes, it's conceivable that my eating that big steak might mean somebody else couldn't eat, and then I'd agree with you that perhaps I should feel guilty about it. But whether I eat that big, juicy, delicious steak or not, doesn't affect those poor, starving people in the world in the least. The problems are much more complex than that. If they weren't, we could solve the problem by shipping all the unused food (day old bread, out of date food, etc) to the poor.
The first, of course, is simple capitalism. The poor, starving people of the world don't have the funds to pay for food. This is one that both individuals and countries can resolve, if they find it in their hearts to want to.
The second is distribution. Getting the food to those poor, starving people is actually more complex yet. It's not as easy as writing a check, or even sending a ship full of food to their closest city. Remember the scandal in the 80's over all the food sent to Ethiopia and how little of it actually reached the people who needed it most?
And, as you get farther from First World civilization, the problems increase. Sure, you can set up a food bank and a shelter in Chicago and advertise and people will probably hear about it and come. But how do you get the word out to people who don't live in large communities or cities or towns? How does the small family out in the middle of nowhere, desperately trying to eke out a meager existence, learn that they could have free food if they only knew to travel 100 miles to the closest town? You or I eating less doesn't impact that problem in the slightest.
Wouldn't be the first time. When Commodore brought out the Amiga they gave Electronic Arts a huge sum of money to be one of the development houses to have titles ready when the Amiga shipped. They also stipulated that EA wouldn't release any of those titles for other platforms for a period of time (a year, if I recall). It's why you didn't see EA titles on the Mac, Atari ST or PC (and most of it was shovelware. Seven Cities of Gold was not technically difficult on any of those platforms!) EA was more than happy to engage in an exclusive license with CBM, and even touted it in ads of the day. I see no reason why they wouldn't be willing to do the same for Microsoft, a much bigger 800-pound gorilla than even Commodore was in it's heyday.
While one VHS tape is cheaper than one Travan or 8mm or DLT or whatever, those other tapes are reusable for some time, having to buy a new VHS tape for every day (or week or however often you backup) added up to far more cost than using a regular tape drive, and the VCR backup/restore process was incredibly slow, so there was no upside other than initial cost (everybody has a VCR, right?).
And you could play 4 players on EVERY C64, unlike the Atari version where you could only play 4 players on the models with 4 joystick ports. So there!
It's just simpler to have a bootable DOS Floppy that loads NOTHING and lets you flash things without worrying about memory managers or something else trashing your system.
Of course, this is a non-issue with Macs, as Apples upgrade policy has always been "Buy a new one".
Yes, this seems obvious to US, but don't forget, the legal system is geared towards INCREASING competition, not reducing it. Anti-trust laws, and laws prohibiting collusion are there precisely to foster competition.
Ford and GM can't work together to make a (fill in part of car) precisely because the system WANTS the other to try to improve on the part that the first built. That's how we get innovation, and technological advance. Ford makes something, then GM tries to make a better one, so Ford has to try to make a better one yet. The consumer wins. It is not only legal for Ford to buy a Chevy and take it apart to see what GM is doing these days, it's encouraged.
DMCA does precisely the opposite. It makes competition more difficult, and it prevents innovation.
Sir Isaac Newton said, "If I have seen farther than other men, it is because I stood on the shoulders of giants". He was able to learn from those who preceded him, and take their work and extend it. DMCA stops that. We are putting barriers to knowledge exchange, precisely at a time in our history when our education system is recognized as in need of improvement.
When we were children, taking things apart and figuring out how they worked was encouraged, and a sign of intelligence. It enabled us to grow up to be the hackers and Engineers and make the technology that feeds this great economic boom. DMCA deprives that next generation of that start, and ensures that we will criminalize the very people we need most, young people who are curious and smart enough to make technology for the 21st Century.
Corporate profits should not stand in the way of education and the free sharing of knowledge.
IE wouldn't render (completely) our corporate database-enabled web page, but would hang half way down, so our entire company used Netscape anyway. Netscape, Opera, Mozilla, Konquerer, there are many choices for companies that wish to allow Web Browsing.
I think it's a tremendous leap to move to Linux on the desktop today, and I would say you are probably right that it is not quite ready, but I agree with the original poster that many companies are becoming fed up with the forced-upgrade path Microsoft uses to generate revenue.
Want to install Exchange Server? "Oh, we've discontinued Exchange 5.5, you have to buy Exchange 2000 and to run it you HAVE to buy Windows 2000 in spite of the fact that your NT 4.0 server is running just fine". We wanted to add an additional SQL Server system, but found out that Microsoft pulled all the SQL Server 6.5 and 7.0 packages and nobody could sell us one, we had to wait for SQL Server 2000 and it would only run on Windows 2000, so now we had to upgrade a server (or build a new one). Then you have to look at the Primary Domain Controller, since a Win2K machine isn't happy with an NT 4 PDC, and so on and so on. It's THOSE continuous fees that companies are fed up with. The product we HAVE works great. We want another just like it, but we can't get it, we have to get it's newer replacement, but oh yeah, you have to upgrade all your other systems to interoperate now.
Sorry, just checked and the Office Pro upgrade is $329. That's still cheaper than $150 per year, and in my case, I DEFINITELY couldn't find $329 worth of improvement (I DO like the multiple clipboards, though).
I don't disagree with you about the improvement involved in flipping a switch. That would improve accuracy and that's a good thing. You still have to show some initiative to vote, and that implies (though not necessarily accurately) that you showed some initiative to have a reason to vote the way you did.
As for anybodies job... the polls are open from 7 am to 7 pm. Very few people work all of those hours, and if you do, get an absentee ballot! They are easy to obtain (I don't know about your state, but here in Florida they send you a form well in advance of the election, all you have to do is send it back, you get an absentee ballot). I wouldn't mind seeing PDF files of absentee ballots on the net, since they still have to be matched up against voter records at the counting stage and duplicates could be eliminated then.
I do not believe (as Katz apparently does) that we should be voting from the comfort of our homes. We may be the laziest nation in the world, but that would be extreme.