I "understand" the statistical models, but once you go from 10 in 100000 to 1 in 40,000,000,000 over a time period of 78,000,000 years, concurrent with a hundreds or thousands of other useful features (teeth, claws, scales, a sense of smell, orgasm, varios appendages, flame-throwing ducts, etc.) it all gets a bit more complex. When you add in the stastics for all of the parts as a whole you are talking about STAGGERING numbers.
And for all the "natural selection" comments thanks for pointing out the obvious hole in my comment. I have actually read a paragraph or two about evolution. Over the years the theory of evolution has changed quite a bit, when I was in school in the 80's the idea of slow and steady progression was dominant, but then there started to be talk of periods of sudden environmental "pressure" causing changes in (relatively) short periods of time. This new theory was thought to account for the lack of transitional stages in the fossil records. The problem with that theory was that conventional wisdom had said that there was no environmental factor in evolution EXCEPT natural selection. If that was indeed true then the fossil record should have shown the transitions much more clearly as nature tried and failed multiple combinations. Attempting to find OTHER ways that the environment might effect the nature and number of the changes was really the point of my comment.
Has always been the "random but useful" nature it relied on. Maybe it is just a matter of getting my head around the huge numbers involved in the statistical chances of enough random mutations piling up on each other to give an organism stereoscopic color vision. If this discovery turns out to support even a rudimentary "talk back" mechanism that allows the environment to have some say on the number and nature of mutations I think it goes a VERY long way it making Evolutionary Theory a much more elegant idea. I think some people have fewer "religious" objections to evolution and more "it just doesn't seem possible" ones than most scientists would like to admit.
I would like to see some version of the virtual folders like those in Evolution in the GNOME and/or KDE desktops. It looks like that may be one handy feature coming up in Longhorn. If we start work now maybe we can beat the Longhorn release date:).
I realize that if I want all my pictures in one folder I could just put them in one folder instead of scattering them all over the machine, but for me it would be nice to have the virtual folders show files from ALL of my machines at once.
So congratulations Microsoft, I have found a feature that I would like. if I still used Windows. I wouldn't upgrade to get it mind you, but I would at least know there was something I couldn't do on XP that I could on Longhorn.
OK several people have mentioned it, but apparently the other posters don't seem to catch the hint.
FreeNX does a new connection for each user on the fly. It allows printer, file and sound sharing. It works over SLOW connections. It is cross platform. It allows you to disconnect from a session and rejoin later. It has a commercial version if you want support. I can be used to connect a single app instead of a desktop.
If it doesn't do what you want then neither does Terminal Services.
If they had made a more specific mention of their problems with CSS2. OK, it's flawed, would a little constructive commentary on how to fix it kill them? Is it not flexible enough? Too flexible? Too hard to extend in a proprietary way?
Because if developers use any "new feature" that comes down the pike they create an incentive for companies to constantly change the software to break compatibility with competitors. MS and Moz both implement a non-standard feature, MS or Moz change the way that not standard feature works... and poof you are back on the treadmill monkeyboy, supporting 2 non-standard features. At least if you code to a standard you know which implementation you SHOULD use, and you know who broke away on purpose.
Several years ago Microsoft announced a version of Media Player would be released for Linux. At the time it was widely suspected (amoung Linux users) that the announcement was just a ploy to stall the development of audio and video players for Linux, at the time they were all in the early stages.
Maybe Microsft intended to deliver, maybe they didn't, but when the marketing department issues a statement like that and then the company quietly lets that product drop, is that an ethical use of marketing? And if MS never INTENDED to deliver I can't see how someone would even attempt to argue that the annoucement was ethical, but it was marketing.
My biggest caveat with this announcement is that I see no mention of free updates. I expected the program to be free, but you has to refresh the data on these things...
Linux is under litigation. Can you name a major OS that has not been in a legal battle over some sort of IP dispute? At least most Linux distributors have not been convicted of serious violation of federal laws.
MS-DOS a product bought from another company. Licensed to IBM partially through having the rails at IBM greased by a friend of the Gates family on IBM's board.
Other DOS products are later coming to market because all of the IBM PC's and software were shipped and built with MS-DOS. First to market equal a temporary but real "natural monopoly"
Windows is introduced, goes no where (1.1) New Windows (2.0) goes nowhere. Windows 3 comes out and interest grows. About this time DR-DOS starts to make in-roads with a smaller memory footprint and better tools.
Through all early versions of Windows MS-DOS compatibility is a key requirement because they hold the dominant position in that market.
Windows 3.1 comes out with a mysterious message that indicates using anything other than MS-DOS could have dire consequences (not just opinion a court found this to be anti-competitive behavior years after the fact) 3.0, 3.1, 3.11 all contain some "peer networking" to help eat away at the Novell NOS. (not non-competetive, very shrewd)
OS/2 (first big "non-dos" OS for IBM PC's since CPM) written by MS for IBM. The enterprise market shows interest. OS/2 version 2 comes out, hailed as the future by Microsoft and IBM. Development of OS/2 slows, friction between IBM and MS. IBM pulls OS/2 away from MS, because it becomes apparent that MS has been dragging it's feet so that it has time to develop a competing product.
DR-DOS begins to rebuild from the "mysterious" message in 3x versions of windows. But it is too late, Windows 95 comes out almost impossible to separate it from MS-DOS. Now the GUI is king for sure.
Windows NT comes out. Runs text mode OS/2 apps because of a shared code base.
So there you go. Get the business through inside contacts (hey it's business, it happens), screw one competitor and pay the (small) price in court later to keep your momentum. Screw a partner to buy time, ideas and capital for your next generation product...PROFIT!
Gnome 2.8 is in Mandrake cooker if that helps:). I expect that soon Debian will reform the way it does things, it was one thing when they fell behind the corporately driven SUSE, Redhat, Mandrake, etc. but now that there are several "Debian based" distros that are trying to keep packages up to date Debian risks losing developers to faster moving community driven distros like Mepis and Ubuntu.
I just had this idea, and while it seems workable I don't have the training or inclination to make it happen. To make the system work you would need to solve some engineering problems but existing battery technology should be up to it. I hereby place this idea in the public domain (assuming it isn't an old and patented idea, of course:) )
Instead of large batteries in cars, use a 'tank' of small self orienting batteries, maybe the size of a BB. By self orienting I mean that they have to be able to line up the + and negtive - poles by themselves (engineering problem one, making the small batteries is fairly common though the cost effectiveness may be questionable)
If the small batteries can be recharged then you charge them at home, at work, whatever. When they degrade or when you are on a trip that is outside of your 1 charge range you go to a battery station. At the battery station you do 2 things.
1. you empty your battery tank. as the tank empties the "station" divides the small batteries into "good" and "bad" batteries (chargable and non, live or dead, whatever the criteria) (this is the BIG engineering task quick sorting of good and bad)
2. fill up with a tank of good batteries. Your cost is based on the ratio of good to bad batteries that you turned in. If your batteries are all dead and unchargeable you are filling up, if your ratio is half and half you are buying half a tank etc. (plus the inevitable taxes, fees, etc.)
Maybe this is impractical but I don't see any reason why it would be given the reasonable limits of today's technology. Good luck if someone takes this idea and runs with it.
I couldn't disagree more about selling the airwaves off permanently, the "owner" of the airwaves would automatically be a de facto monopoly in the US. No TV or radio broadcasts without the owners permission, including military and law enforcement communications, 100's if not 1000's of industries would close over night.
I think public ownership of radio frequencies is the only stance that comes close to being reasonable, with the possible exception of treating them the same way we treat visible light (and really what is the reason we treat light differenty?)
Maybe Microsoft gave them a chunk of money to hold the game and develop it for the next version of the Xbox? They are going to need a string of top games to introduce the platform, so why not hold off a "highly anticipated" game for when it will do the most for you?
There is a question of where the "Tech Support" job begins and ends. I often field calls from people who ask me what they can do to lower their risks of Spyware installing itself, but I can't really recommend Moz/firefox etc. because our company intranet will refuse to even TRY and display on a Gecko based browser (even with a forged ID saying it is IE). I've been shutdown by callers who "...don't want to know how it works, I just want you to make it stop" if that is the attitude you are facing it will be an uphill battle trying to "support" them by giving them the knowledge to help themselves.
On planet Bizarro perhaps it would be possible to code an application to run with a service pack that isn't out yet, but here on Earth if you want applications to run on your OS it is best not to change things so drastically in a SERVICE PACK that it breaks a significant percentage of the applications that WERE written for the OS. So yes, it is the responsibility of the OS to run applications that were written for it. This goes for Linux and BSD too. If Linus wrote a patch that broke Mozilla I can guarantee you that the major Linux vendors would not push that change out to users before the conflict was corrected. A Linux distribution is what you need to compare to Windows not a custom kernel based on last night's kernel patches, and I frankly can't remember the last time the patches I got from a distribution vendor broke even 1% of the apps I have on my machine.
Don't get me wrong, this service pack would have been part of Windows XP when is was created if Microsoft weren't whipped by its own marketing department, and the security improvements in it are much needed. Microsoft is now facing the pain of having encouraged programmers to use the sloppy security of Windows to make applications "user-friendly",so they are going to spread that pain to all the developers that were unfortunate enough to listen to them.
Try what this man suggests! I have a similar setup with my ISP. The "Real" IP address is often dynamic and may change more frequently than the the 10.* address but if you can go out to someplace like whatismyip.com and find a "Real" address that leads back to your machine (try ssh/ftp/etc/ into the "Real" address and see if it goes to your machine), then dyndns.com or something similar will allow you to set up a name for your machine (mybox.dyndns.com for example ) and you can set up a script or program (they have them for OSX, Window, Unix, Linux, and others) that periodiically will synchronize with a dynamic address service.
I think a lot of companies would like to use a plan similar to yours, simply because if they get past the first hump of making you check for updates they are at least halfway there to getting you to INSTALL those updates. Unfortunately we have seen the way some of our less than reputable corporate citizens would abuse that. They know a lot of people won't read the descriptions, so removing a feature here, or adding DRM there would not even be noticed until the "upgrade" is done.
You are going to get a lot of opinions from this question. He are mine.
Remember why you want to have Linux, and stick with the distros that fit that niche. At guess I would say you should stick with a major commercial distro. Don't be fooled by the "just emerge foo" crowd. Gentoo is a great distro, but if you want to get up and running SuSe, Fedora, Mandrake, all can be installed and updated in an hour or so if you have a fast internet connection. Also if you are a C# programmer, remember to at least install GNOME and all the Mono pieces, they might come in handy.
It's funny but every now and then I hear a statistic that says that the top 1% of our economy control over 90% of the wealth, but you're saying that the top 10% pays half of the taxes. Seems like someone is getting off light if both statistics are true.
Are you hoping to make money off the code? Off of the controllers? Given the information you gave us so far you will end up selling 1000 controllers ("units" I'm assuming refers to hardware) so that is good. License the code any way you like and charge a one time cost for the code. GPL, MPL -like, whatever, allows you to charge for your code. If the code gives you some particular advantage in your market then write up a license that stops them from delivering the code to others but allow them to modify it for themselves.
In short, license it in the most liberal way you can to allow your company to keep the value invested in it without ruining its value to the buyer (they have been working with it all this time, if they lose the ability to alter it now they won't be happy).
I like spatial mode. But the GNOME developers should be careful about ignoring complaints about the lack of options. Linux users aren't fond of being told what's best for them and it wouldn't be a huge development effort to make an options page for the top 5-10 things that GNOME users complain about not having an easy way to change (i.e. not tracking down a gconf key, please let's not head down the path of the undocumented/obscure reg-hacks again)
Or how to sell it to management? The reasons it is a good idea are listed by other comments, but unfortunately selling it to your bosses may have nothing to do with why it is a good idea. If you have forward thinking, long term strategy bosses you have a much better chance. If they are convinced that having software for Linux is their competitive advantage, they're probably not going to let that go. Right now they may even be right. Sharing the code before the competition has started developing their own solutions may kill a market advantage. If they open the code at the right time, say just before the competition rolls out their beta software that they spent months developing;), then your company can leverage the advantages of open code (i.e. outside input, bug checking, increased customer input) as the NEW advantage.
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I "understand" the statistical models, but once you go from 10 in 100000 to 1 in 40,000,000,000 over a time period of 78,000,000 years, concurrent with a hundreds or thousands of other useful features (teeth, claws, scales, a sense of smell, orgasm, varios appendages, flame-throwing ducts, etc.) it all gets a bit more complex. When you add in the stastics for all of the parts as a whole you are talking about STAGGERING numbers.
And for all the "natural selection" comments thanks for pointing out the obvious hole in my comment. I have actually read a paragraph or two about evolution. Over the years the theory of evolution has changed quite a bit, when I was in school in the 80's the idea of slow and steady progression was dominant, but then there started to be talk of periods of sudden environmental "pressure" causing changes in (relatively) short periods of time. This new theory was thought to account for the lack of transitional stages in the fossil records. The problem with that theory was that conventional wisdom had said that there was no environmental factor in evolution EXCEPT natural selection. If that was indeed true then the fossil record should have shown the transitions much more clearly as nature tried and failed multiple combinations. Attempting to find OTHER ways that the environment might effect the nature and number of the changes was really the point of my comment.
Has always been the "random but useful" nature it relied on. Maybe it is just a matter of getting my head around the huge numbers involved in the statistical chances of enough random mutations piling up on each other to give an organism stereoscopic color vision. If this discovery turns out to support even a rudimentary "talk back" mechanism that allows the environment to have some say on the number and nature of mutations I think it goes a VERY long way it making Evolutionary Theory a much more elegant idea. I think some people have fewer "religious" objections to evolution and more "it just doesn't seem possible" ones than most scientists would like to admit.
I would like to see some version of the virtual folders like those in Evolution in the GNOME and/or KDE desktops. It looks like that may be one handy feature coming up in Longhorn. If we start work now maybe we can beat the Longhorn release date :).
I realize that if I want all my pictures in one folder I could just put them in one folder instead of scattering them all over the machine, but for me it would be nice to have the virtual folders show files from ALL of my machines at once.
So congratulations Microsoft, I have found a feature that I would like. if I still used Windows. I wouldn't upgrade to get it mind you, but I would at least know there was something I couldn't do on XP that I could on Longhorn.
If you think there is an audio cable that is WORTH 3000 Euro a foot, I seriously suggest you reprioritize, but hey it is your money.
OK several people have mentioned it, but apparently the other posters don't seem to catch the hint.
FreeNX does a new connection for each user on the fly.
It allows printer, file and sound sharing.
It works over SLOW connections.
It is cross platform.
It allows you to disconnect from a session and rejoin later.
It has a commercial version if you want support.
I can be used to connect a single app instead of a desktop.
If it doesn't do what you want then neither does Terminal Services.
If they had made a more specific mention of their problems with CSS2. OK, it's flawed, would a little constructive commentary on how to fix it kill them? Is it not flexible enough? Too flexible? Too hard to extend in a proprietary way?
Because if developers use any "new feature" that comes down the pike they create an incentive for companies to constantly change the software to break compatibility with competitors. MS and Moz both implement a non-standard feature, MS or Moz change the way that not standard feature works... and poof you are back on the treadmill monkeyboy, supporting 2 non-standard features. At least if you code to a standard you know which implementation you SHOULD use, and you know who broke away on purpose.
Several years ago Microsoft announced a version of Media Player would be released for Linux. At the time it was widely suspected (amoung Linux users) that the announcement was just a ploy to stall the development of audio and video players for Linux, at the time they were all in the early stages.
Maybe Microsft intended to deliver, maybe they didn't, but when the marketing department issues a statement like that and then the company quietly lets that product drop, is that an ethical use of marketing? And if MS never INTENDED to deliver I can't see how someone would even attempt to argue that the annoucement was ethical, but it was marketing.
My biggest caveat with this announcement is that I see no mention of free updates. I expected the program to be free, but you has to refresh the data on these things...
Linux is under litigation. Can you name a major OS that has not been in a legal battle over some sort of IP dispute? At least most Linux distributors have not been convicted of serious violation of federal laws.
OK, I'll bite.
MS-DOS a product bought from another company.
Licensed to IBM partially through having the rails at IBM greased by a friend of the Gates family on IBM's board.
Other DOS products are later coming to market because all of the IBM PC's and software were shipped and built with MS-DOS. First to market equal a temporary but real "natural monopoly"
Windows is introduced, goes no where (1.1)
New Windows (2.0) goes nowhere.
Windows 3 comes out and interest grows. About this time DR-DOS starts to make in-roads with a smaller memory footprint and better tools.
Through all early versions of Windows MS-DOS compatibility is a key requirement because they hold the dominant position in that market.
Windows 3.1 comes out with a mysterious message that indicates using anything other than MS-DOS could have dire consequences (not just opinion a court found this to be anti-competitive behavior years after the fact) 3.0, 3.1, 3.11 all contain some "peer networking" to help eat away at the Novell NOS. (not non-competetive, very shrewd)
OS/2 (first big "non-dos" OS for IBM PC's since CPM) written by MS for IBM. The enterprise market shows interest.
OS/2 version 2 comes out, hailed as the future by Microsoft and IBM.
Development of OS/2 slows, friction between IBM and MS.
IBM pulls OS/2 away from MS, because it becomes apparent that MS has been dragging it's feet so that it has time to develop a competing product.
DR-DOS begins to rebuild from the "mysterious" message in 3x versions of windows. But it is too late, Windows 95 comes out almost impossible to separate it from MS-DOS. Now the GUI is king for sure.
Windows NT comes out. Runs text mode OS/2 apps because of a shared code base.
So there you go. Get the business through inside contacts (hey it's business, it happens), screw one competitor and pay the (small) price in court later to keep your momentum. Screw a partner to buy time, ideas and capital for your next generation product...PROFIT!
Gnome 2.8 is in Mandrake cooker if that helps :). I expect that soon Debian will reform the way it does things, it was one thing when they fell behind the corporately driven SUSE, Redhat, Mandrake, etc. but now that there are several "Debian based" distros that are trying to keep packages up to date Debian risks losing developers to faster moving community driven distros like Mepis and Ubuntu.
"Microsoft wants you to upgrade."
Get the hint, you haven't paid for the privelege of a MS operating system in at least 3 years and they want more money.
I just had this idea, and while it seems workable I don't have the training or inclination to make it happen. To make the system work you would need to solve some engineering problems but existing battery technology should be up to it. I hereby place this idea in the public domain (assuming it isn't an old and patented idea, of course:) )
Instead of large batteries in cars, use a 'tank' of small self orienting batteries, maybe the size of a BB. By self orienting I mean that they have to be able to line up the + and negtive - poles by themselves (engineering problem one, making the small batteries is fairly common though the cost effectiveness may be questionable)
If the small batteries can be recharged then you charge them at home, at work, whatever. When they degrade or when you are on a trip that is outside of your 1 charge range you go to a battery station. At the battery station you do 2 things.
1. you empty your battery tank. as the tank empties the "station" divides the small batteries into "good" and "bad" batteries (chargable and non, live or dead, whatever the criteria) (this is the BIG engineering task quick sorting of good and bad)
2. fill up with a tank of good batteries. Your cost is based on the ratio of good to bad batteries that you turned in. If your batteries are all dead and unchargeable you are filling up, if your ratio is half and half you are buying half a tank etc. (plus the inevitable taxes, fees, etc.)
Maybe this is impractical but I don't see any reason why it would be given the reasonable limits of today's technology. Good luck if someone takes this idea and runs with it.
I couldn't disagree more about selling the airwaves off permanently, the "owner" of the airwaves would automatically be a de facto monopoly in the US. No TV or radio broadcasts without the owners permission, including military and law enforcement communications, 100's if not 1000's of industries would close over night.
I think public ownership of radio frequencies is the only stance that comes close to being reasonable, with the possible exception of treating them the same way we treat visible light (and really what is the reason we treat light differenty?)
Maybe Microsoft gave them a chunk of money to hold the game and develop it for the next version of the Xbox? They are going to need a string of top games to introduce the platform, so why not hold off a "highly anticipated" game for when it will do the most for you?
There is a question of where the "Tech Support" job begins and ends. I often field calls from people who ask me what they can do to lower their risks of Spyware installing itself, but I can't really recommend Moz/firefox etc. because our company intranet will refuse to even TRY and display on a Gecko based browser (even with a forged ID saying it is IE).
I've been shutdown by callers who "...don't want to know how it works, I just want you to make it stop" if that is the attitude you are facing it will be an uphill battle trying to "support" them by giving them the knowledge to help themselves.
On planet Bizarro perhaps it would be possible to code an application to run with a service pack that isn't out yet, but here on Earth if you want applications to run on your OS it is best not to change things so drastically in a SERVICE PACK that it breaks a significant percentage of the applications that WERE written for the OS. So yes, it is the responsibility of the OS to run applications that were written for it. This goes for Linux and BSD too. If Linus wrote a patch that broke Mozilla I can guarantee you that the major Linux vendors would not push that change out to users before the conflict was corrected. A Linux distribution is what you need to compare to Windows not a custom kernel based on last night's kernel patches, and I frankly can't remember the last time the patches I got from a distribution vendor broke even 1% of the apps I have on my machine.
Don't get me wrong, this service pack would have been part of Windows XP when is was created if Microsoft weren't whipped by its own marketing department, and the security improvements in it are much needed. Microsoft is now facing the pain of having encouraged programmers to use the sloppy security of Windows to make applications "user-friendly",so they are going to spread that pain to all the developers that were unfortunate enough to listen to them.
Try what this man suggests! I have a similar setup with my ISP. The "Real" IP address is often dynamic and may change more frequently than the the 10.* address but if you can go out to someplace like whatismyip.com and find a "Real" address that leads back to your machine (try ssh/ftp/etc/ into the "Real" address and see if it goes to your machine), then dyndns.com or something similar will allow you to set up a name for your machine (mybox.dyndns.com for example ) and you can set up a script or program (they have them for OSX, Window, Unix, Linux, and others) that periodiically will synchronize with a dynamic address service.
I think a lot of companies would like to use a plan similar to yours, simply because if they get past the first hump of making you check for updates they are at least halfway there to getting you to INSTALL those updates. Unfortunately we have seen the way some of our less than reputable corporate citizens would abuse that. They know a lot of people won't read the descriptions, so removing a feature here, or adding DRM there would not even be noticed until the "upgrade" is done.
You are going to get a lot of opinions from this question. He are mine.
Remember why you want to have Linux, and stick with the distros that fit that niche. At guess I would say you should stick with a major commercial distro. Don't be fooled by the "just emerge foo" crowd. Gentoo is a great distro, but if you want to get up and running SuSe, Fedora, Mandrake, all can be installed and updated in an hour or so if you have a fast internet connection. Also if you are a C# programmer, remember to at least install GNOME and all the Mono pieces, they might come in handy.
It's funny but every now and then I hear a statistic that says that the top 1% of our economy control over 90% of the wealth, but you're saying that the top 10% pays half of the taxes. Seems like someone is getting off light if both statistics are true.
Are you hoping to make money off the code? Off of the controllers? Given the information you gave us so far you will end up selling 1000 controllers ("units" I'm assuming refers to hardware) so that is good. License the code any way you like and charge a one time cost for the code. GPL, MPL -like, whatever, allows you to charge for your code. If the code gives you some particular advantage in your market then write up a license that stops them from delivering the code to others but allow them to modify it for themselves.
In short, license it in the most liberal way you can to allow your company to keep the value invested in it without ruining its value to the buyer (they have been working with it all this time, if they lose the ability to alter it now they won't be happy).
I like spatial mode. But the GNOME developers should be careful about ignoring complaints about the lack of options. Linux users aren't fond of being told what's best for them and it wouldn't be a huge development effort to make an options page for the top 5-10 things that GNOME users complain about not having an easy way to change (i.e. not tracking down a gconf key, please let's not head down the path of the undocumented/obscure reg-hacks again)
Or how to sell it to management? The reasons it is a good idea are listed by other comments, but unfortunately selling it to your bosses may have nothing to do with why it is a good idea. If you have forward thinking, long term strategy bosses you have a much better chance. If they are convinced that having software for Linux is their competitive advantage, they're probably not going to let that go. Right now they may even be right. Sharing the code before the competition has started developing their own solutions may kill a market advantage. If they open the code at the right time, say just before the competition rolls out their beta software that they spent months developing;), then your company can leverage the advantages of open code (i.e. outside input, bug checking, increased customer input) as the NEW advantage.