Money doesn't always get you everything
on
Apache down, IIS up
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· Score: 3, Informative
> It's not like they can pay large percentages of the industry to switch over.
What makes you think they can't?
Little things like...oh...the Sherman Antitrust Act, anti-dumping provisions in the WTO, and likely future court rulings and legislation that might result from that sort of behaviour (especially from the EU and Asian countries that are slowly growing more hostile to Microsoft).
It is one thing to offer your your software for free as has been done with IE since the start. Even when Microsoft moved IE from the "Plus! Pack" onto the Windows install CD when they supplanted Win95 with Win95A there was not much to complain about. MS' practices became questionable by the time Win98 came out, when IE became a required part of the OS install and applications started coming out with IE dependencies as this put competitors at a disadvantage. I say questionable because even after a decade it is still a point of debate if such practices should be regulated.
With Windows Server, IIS is right on the OS install CD and is increasingly integrated with the OS and other server software (SQL reporting services, sharepoint, team foundation server, etc). This is reaching the point of being questionable behaviour, however I think the competition has accepted that MS has decided such things as web browsers and HTTP servers are "components" of desktop and server OSes respectively--and it is a bit difficult to complain about it when Linux distributions almost universally bundle such applications with their OS installs too.
as they've shown in the past, they're not at all averse to taking large financial hits to ruin a competitor
Absolutely. However, selling at a loss or giving software away for free (as in beer) is one thing. Bribing your competitor's customers to switch, especially when your competitor is non-commercial, is not only ethically and morally unacceptable to most people--it is almost always illegal too. The most definite line that would be crossed is going from discounts, to give-aways, to actually offering money or gifts to potential customers. At my place of employment, it is made very clear to everyone that exchanging anything but the most nominal gift with potential customers--even if it doesn't involve luring them from a competitor--is an offence punishable by immediate dismissal even on the first offence.
Sure, until your PHB strolls in and declares that "we're switching to Microsoft!".
I feel fortunate that the economic climate where I'm at right now is a job-hunter's market and a person can be selective. Even if it weren't, however, if *my* PHB were to just stroll in and pronounce that we were making major, disruptive IT infrastructure changes without previous consultation with others just because some salesbot from MS offered him some swag then I'd immedately set about updating my resume and finding work elsewhere. Not only do I not like at a job where the opinions and concerns of employees are not considered--it has also been my experience that organisations with managers that "stroll in and declare" such things are destined to fail if they do not change. This goes both ways, by the way--I think that it would be equally as bad if the PHB at an all-MS shop were to stroll in and declare "we are switching to Linux" without any apparent good reason.
Sony lost out, only because of price, not quality.
My dad has always been a fan of new technology. When we got a satellite dish (no cable in rural areas) we also decided to get a VCR so we could tape movies and such (we had a fairly advanced system with a high-gain C-Band LNB that worked with an "amazingly small" 8 foot dish!). After seeing a noticeable difference in picture quality we decided to get a Sony Betamax VCR despite the slightly higher cost.
It didn't take too long to become frustrated with the short recording time--I believe it topped out at 120 minutes, and there was a LOT of stuff that we recorded that ran over that. We did find longer tapes eventially that held 180 minutes that helped quite a bit, but they were harder to find and more expensive (over 50% more expensive even though they were only 50% longer). "But wait--I'm sure Beta tapes could hold more". Yes they could--but not when it first came out. Betamax ended up with three playback/record speeds (Beta I/II/III) like VHS, however The Beta III record speed was not on our machine (it wasn't on any at the beginning IIRC).
Eventually we had problems with our Sony VCR--it would play back but when recording the video would drop out--at first for a few frames, then for seconds to minutes, always at random intervals. We replaced it with a Sanyo--another Beta because of our existing library. This VCR could record in B-III so we now had an ample amount of time even on the most common-sized tape. However, VHS had gotten a foothold by then and aside from price, I recall the REAL selling point was the much bigger recording time.
There was another issue too which affected our alliegence to the Beta format even before it became too hard to find pre-recorded content. Eventaully our second Beta VCR suffered from the EXACT SAME RECORDING PROBLEM as the older Sony did. Perhaps this is anecdotal, but the repairmen said the same thing--that these problems with recording crpooed up more often in Beta VCRs than VHS, regardless of the make or model. So Beta VCRs might've had better PICTURE quality, VHS had better HARDWARE quality (more reliable). Given the delay in Blu-Ray player releases due to last-minute "extra testing", as well as the delays in the PS3 (and speculation that it is due to problems with the Blu-Ray player) it sounds like there could be some stubborn reliability problems, and with HD-DVD players and movies already out the pressure to get to market could possibly mean Blu-Ray players might be pushed out the door before they should be.
Of course it is much too early to predict a winner in this format war, and they may coexist for so long that both will be supplanted by an even newer technology before one camp wins. In any case there are a few uncomfortable signs that Blu-Ray has lost its edge from a market-competitveness advantage.
The salesperson will tell her, "With Blu-Ray every movie fits on a single disk. With HD-DVD you will need two disks for each movie.
And the salesperson will be full of crap. Single-layer HD-DVDs hold 15 GB--more than three times what single layer DVDs hold. If you encoded the HD video using the same MPEG2 format used by standard DVD you'd get about 75 minutes of HD video on a single layer HD-DVD--not enough to fit most movies. However, the compression used on both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray is more efficient, allowing for much more video to fit on a single disc. You could easily fit double the video as a result (2.5 hours) and perhaps even more (up to 4 hours).
With the release of dual-layer HD-DVDs there will be much more space than required for any movie out there, allowing for more extended features/enhanced content. Even Sony themselves concede they don't envision too many movies that would even fill one single-layered Blu-Ray disc, much less a dual-layered HD-DVD.
Which one do you think she will buy?
If she listens to the full-o-crap salesman then probably the Blu-Ray machine. Then she'll be upset when she finds out she payed almost double for the player and finds out that HD-DVD movies DO come on single discs, she can't notice any difference in picture quality and only a fraction of movie releases take advantage of the extra Blu-Ray capacity to deliver extra content.
This is Beta vs. VHS all over again, and perhaps Sony thinks that since it has the capacity edge (where VHS had much longer playing/recording times) that it has HD-DVD beat. Sony would be wrong. Firstly, when Betamax first came out the best reording time was something like 120 minutes (The "Beta III" speed and longer tapes came out later allowing for 3 or 4 hours on a tape, but by then VHS was out). Consumers could've forgiven a smaller capacity, but not one so small that they might have a hard time fitting a movie on one tape. This time around, it isn't too-small vs. larger-than-needed, it is large-enough vs. larger-then needed. Secondly, Sony is repeating stupid mistakes by insisting on too-greedy licensing terms and using more complex technology. Aunt Bea might not like the idea of switching discs for some longer movies (if it were true), but if it means saving $500 on the player and a few dollars in the cost of a video she might not think it such a problem.
Most software is non-critical, and the software that is critical (flight control systems) are developed with security and reliability in mind
Just becasue the failure of some software doesn't maim or kill people, or is not the direct cause of millions of dollars in losses, doesn't mean that consumers shouldn't be warranted against defects. Commercial software is notoriously lax in comparison to most other consumer goods--for example, about all Microsoft warrants against is damaged physical media. The law is significantly more stringent for minimum warranties on physical goods, even "non-critical" items. Your car isn't just warranted against safety-related problems for example (to bring up that tired "if Windows was a car" analogy, if Windows were a car it would not be covered under warranty if an engine flaw caused it to stall every 10 minuts because there are no performace guaranteed). The least they can do is give you a refund for the cost of the software.
There has to be a reasonable balance, and right now the software industry is "unbalanced". End users certainly don't demand "ciritcal-systems" reliability from their home computer's productivity applications--they just want value for their dollar. If I go to Home Depot and buy an electric drill that falls apart due to poor design or manufacture I expect I should be able to take it back because it cannot properly drill holes or drive screws. On average commercial software is more expensive than a drill, however I have a much harder time returning it for refund because it crashes my computer when I try to use it for the purpose it was meant for (say, I cannot e-file my taxes with the tax program or something, when it says right on the box it can do the job). It's not like we want millions in liability coverage included.
Does this jeopardise Free software? I don't think it does at all. If you download free install packages, and especially if you download source for free then compile it yourself, I can't see how any warranty at all can be justified--you take your chances because you get more than what you paid for (which was just your time). However, I'd expect a modest level of warranty for functional deficiencies for SuSE or Red Hat for their commercially distrubuted versions of Linux and other apps, just the same as I do from Microsoft. Is a full refund of purchase price on brand new merchandise really too much to ask for?
In cases where a consultant or systems integrator has made use of open tools, it it they--NOT the original code contributors--who should hold responsible, since it was the consultant who had the job of selecting, modifying and deploying the system (they should review for fitness of purpose). Basically this is the case already--where I work we are responsible for making sure our systems perform as expected, even though our software runs on a Microsoft platform and it is sometimes Microsoft's defects that are the root cause. The reason we are liable is because we made the decision to use the Windows platform and we were responsible for testing and making sure defects in 3rd party software were not critical.
Another poster mentioned the case of collapsing suspended walkways at a luxury hotel in the early 80s. The engineering firm and supplier of the walkway supporting rods were held liable and paid dearly. In the equivalent software situation the liable parties might be the IBM consultant or the designer/developer of a purpose-built, custom software component. Suing Linus Torvalds because a defective system failed due to a Linux kernel bug would be like suing the company that mined and processed the steel to make the rods--because it is one component in a complex assembly of diverse components and should've been adequately tested.
And you can be sure Microsoft wouldn't be one of them, or, if they did, they'd do it all wrong.
Well, we have lived through this with the WWW and we still have standards. Yes, Microsoft was involved. Yes, Microsoft did it all wrong and yes, many IE quirks became defacto standards. However, there is still a standard and at a fundamental level it is still adhered to by all imporatant players. And guess what? Microsoft is being forced to step in line, albeit slowly. Pre.net FrontPage and ASP development tools spewed out atrocious, non-compliant code and ActiveX has been a sourge on the Web. In the early days on Vista development MS boldly declared teh web browser as a distinct application obsolete and abandoned new IE development. Microsoft has, as a result, suffered the consequenses (buggy, insecure software, backlash from users and web developers for its inconsistent rendering behaviour, resurgence of Mozilla browsers, etc).
Now, MS has had to admit they still need a browser and are readying a long-overdue major release of IE and with every version of Visual Studio.Net the HTML generated by ASP.Net apps is more compliant and cross-browser compatible. Standards DO have an effect and given the climate MS is now in (with extra regulatory scruitiny and a slowly but surely growing competition) they may still botch the implementation, but they wouldn't blatanly flout standards like they have in years past.
..but email could be made WAY closer to perfect than it is now.
Let's take video games as the paradigm.
Let's not. Email communication is not in any way like some new PC or console game. The videogames of which you speak are like DVDs--they are published and distributed using archaic methods (boxing and shipping silver plastic discs to stores and homes all over the place) by companies that are propping up an obsolete business model with artificial barriers like copy protection and overzealous copyright laws. Email communication is about electronic distribution and the content is not what is being sold. In a sense, if the videogame industry was email then business would be trying to make money by selling email messages themselves rather than email accounts/mailbox space/connectivity. The two aren't really comparable.
And yet days after release, and sometimes prior to release, their code is hacked, cracked, and distributed.
Perhaps you should compare with ecommerce or banking sites instead of videogames. SSL/TLS encrypted and authenticated communication has been used on secure sites for ages, and it has NEVER been completely compromised. Yes, people have demonstrated that it is crackable with massive computing power, and in response all we had to do was use a larger key. Sure we hear about how people had their credit card numbers stolen from some ecommerce or web banking site, but it has NEVER been because someone defeated the security technology--it has ALWAYS been human error or incompetence (like useing real card info as "test data" or storing the info unencrypted on a database server exposed to the 'net, all the way to banks leaving unshredded sensitive documents in dumpsters or hackers putting keyloggers on cruddy Windows boxes to transmit the info in the clear to their own servers.
How exactly does this new email system stop phishing? Oh, right, it can't.
Well, make sure the certificate is legitimate--those are much harder to spoof than the URL or "from" address. With smart design of the email client (ie an alert written in plain english for the "severely normal" user) we can drastically reduce the problem. Right now people have to fiddle with PGP or GPG and add-on plugins and crap. A new system could have encryption and authentication built into the standard such that every single email could have a signature.
How exactly does this new email system stop users from clicking executables thinking that they are going to see nudie pictures of Katie Holmes?
Ultimately it can't, but it CAN use mimetypes more effectively/be smarter about analysing file content/have integrated support for digitally signed attachments. If someone is such a jello-head that they would get an attachment marked "Executable program, no digital signature" in an email marked as "message not signed, origin unknown" and STILL think they're going to see Katie's titties then they are too f*cking stupid to be online.
How does this new email stop virii?
The problem with *viruses* (people, please stop referring to more than one virus as virii, that's a made up word) is at a lower level than email. The problem is that the most predominant operating system is severely flawed architecturally. There are more viruses discovered in a day for Windows than have been for Linux in the entire history of Linux, and Linux people send and receive plenty of email. Even factoring in the big difference in market share the difference is staggering.
Email can be made virtually virus proof--the problem is that there is no officially standardised way of verifying/signing/managing security of attachments in today's email. Any tools that exist are one-off bolt-ons and are not seamless. An email message is not an executable and any data in the body of a message should not be executable binary code. If an executable is attached it should not be executable until it is decoded and detached, and there should be safeguards to alert the user to fake "katie'
Each of the items I listed are too large and complex, and are beyond repair, but in the same respect could NEVER be recreated in a reasonable time frame.
Two questions:
1) By suggesting email "could NEVER be recreated in a reasonable timeframe" you are inferring that a reinvented email system must be complex. Why would that be? We don't have to re-invent security, authentication, encryption from scratch for use especially for email--we already have the technology and use it extensively (HTTP(S), LDAP, Kerberos, SSH, etc). What is missing in email is an elegant integration of these technologies.
2) Even if architecting a next-generation email system would take a long time, why would that be a problem? What would be a "reasonable" timeframe? Personally I don't think that a W3C-like standards body would take more than 5 years to craft a usable standard, and by the time it hit 1.0 there would already be a lot of early implementations. Sure it would take a long time to adopt, but there could be email gateways like there was between the internet and old-school nets like Fidonet, and those gateways can handle the spam and other crap before they hit any "new and improved" email servers.
When something gets as broken as email people are more motivated to fix it. There are already some interesting ideas out there that could catch on...
criticising MS for favouring security over..... well anything
It isn't that favouring security is the problem, because it is not. MS has finally got priorities straight. The problem is what KIND of security on which they have elected to place their emphasis. I think that many of us propellerheads on/. think more of implementing a secure design at an architectural level. As the author mentions, much of what Microsoft does is "protecting users from their own stupidity". While this addresses security, it is not an effective solution to security problems. While Microsoft has made some effective security changes at lower levels (services off by default, user vs. kernel space for drivers, an installer service that runs under a more appropriate security policy, etc) there is still a lot about the upcoming Windows that is architecturally flawed. Instead of making design changes MS has elected to take the band-aid approach of trying to direct users away from pitfalls due to these architectural flaws (firewalls set to "maximum nag" mode, anti-virus to the hilt, "are you sure" dialogue boxes warning of potentially dangerous consequenses every few clicks...).
Perhaps after another bets build or two MS will have tuned things to make Vista more pleasant to use. However, I expect that for novice computer users Vista will make them frustrated, intimidated and perhaps even afraid of the computer. I can just see how a WWW surfing experience would go in spiffy new Vista-enhanced IE7 (especially given the typical kinds of sites that novice users end up stumbling upon):
*MSN message pops up from buddy with a link to get "these cute little smilies" *noobie clicks on link and IE7 opens with gaudy, blinky ad-ridden website *IE7 pops up a status message saying "The website you are viewing is trying to launch 7 pop-ups. Do you want to see them? *noobie has enough clue to say no. A modal dialogue pops up saying "This website is trying to install an unsigned control . Unsigned software can be used by malicious users to steal sensitive information or damage your computer. Review the information below carefully before proceeding ". The information below states "This whiz-bang addon will enhance your cmputer's performance and make searching more effective by delivering you the latest special offers from our industry-leading partners! You must install this to make full use of our software!" *noobie is confused--is this bad or good? He clicks Yes. An adware BHO is installed but noobie gets cool MSN smilies! OMG! Ponies! *Vista Enchanced Security (R) (TM) springs to action. Firewall brings up dialogue "The Application 'Whiz-Bang' is trying to open an internet connection . Permit? ". At the same time, Antispyware pops up "AntiSpyware has determined the application 'Whiz-Bang' may be spyware . Do you want to disable this application? . *noobie is frustrated--he said he wanted no pop-ups but Vista has "popped-up" three windows in quick succession.
I know all these things can happen in XP if SP2 is on it and it is configured a certain way. However, I suspect Vista will arrive from the factory with all of the MS features that are currently downloadable add-ons bundled right in. Furthermore, I suspect that default settings will be at or near "maximum annoyance" mode. I think after enough of these experiences of continual confirmation box bombardment and warnings about what evil things might happen to your computer if you proceed will make Mr/Ms Noobie either too afraid to do much with their computer, or determined to learn how to disable all these features (after which time Noobie neglects to learn how to keep things enabled without the nagging, resulting in a comprimised machine).
While improvements in Vista will certainly reduce the frequency of serious, high-profile security incidents it'll be a slow reduction and many years before we are at an acceptable state of affairs.
However, I can't even begin to grasp the variation in licenses associated with linux programs. Anyone else as clueless as me?
Pretty much everyone is clueless to some degree except for the author of the license. However it sounds like you are even more clueless regarding propretary licensing, especially for the MS Windows platform. If you DID have a clue about licensing in the proprietary world and actually *read* the EULAs (end-user LICENSE agreements) that come with your Windows OS and software then you wouldn't be complaining about licensing under Linux--you'd be heaping praise on it for SIMPLIFYING licensing.
Let me explain: A typical Linux distribution (sorry--GNU/Linux) is comprised mostly by GPLed software, and most often entirely out of OSI-approved licenses in the case of non-commercial distros. This means that there are common characteristics to all the licenses and a user can (relatively) easily determin what their rights are--and generally the end user has a lot of rights (re-distribution and copying, view and modify source code, etc). Furthermore, as new releases are issued of most open source software the license terms remain the same.
Contrast this with Windows and proprietary Windows-based applications: Microsoft alone--ONE VENDOR--has DOZENS of different licenses. Microsoft often changes its licenses with each new software release too! Furthermore, while open software can sometimes be distributed under "dual licenses" like mySQL, Microsoft has MULTIPLE licenses for many of its products simultaneously. Often these are variants of a standard EULA but there are different details for each one. Win95, Win98, Win98SE, WinMe, WinNT 3.51, NT 4, 2Kpro, 2KServer, XP, 2K3 Server ALL have slightly different EULAs, and in fact the EULAs are different for the SAME EXACT PRODUCT depending on if you are a retail customer, OEM customer or volume licesne customer. You know how that EULA box sometimes pops up during Windows Update? Guess what? Sometimes when you click OK you are letting MS add, change or take away some of the rights you were originally granted when you purchased the software--without compensation! Throw in other vendors that all pull the same EULA crap and you've got an impossible nightmare in terms of licensing.
Given the restrictive nature of typical proprietary EULAs the associated software also contains enforcement mechanisms. I'm sure all but the very casual PC user is painfully familiar with "Product Activation"...
Contrast this with Linux, where the vast majority of open software is licensed under a dozen or less OSI-approved licenses that all share a farily straightforward set of common characteristics. If you think about it, this isn't a disadvantage for Linux at all--it is an ADVANTAGE. In a way, what LSB is trying to do with Linux software distribution is something along the lines of what the FSF and OSI have had some success doing with licensing. We have a baseline for what constitutes open source software licensing that is well established, and if we could have a similar baseline for software distribution so a person can say "this package is an LSB package so I can easily install it on my LSB-compatible OS" then it would be a great step towards catching up to Microsoft's market share.
Now Marcellus has to get "The Wolf" to help us scrape all those bits of Jack Valenti's brain off the floor, walls and ceiling. It won't be a pleasant day at all...
Under Chinese law, aren't most Chinese businesses somewhat partly owned by the Chinese government?
Well, by definition a Chinese business is owned by the Chinese and as such most are government owned. However Apple, Dell, General Motors, Walmart, etc. are NOT Chinese companies and thus there is no ownership by the Chinese government, and no Chinese law states that the government must own a stake in any foreign business operating within China. The closest they come to requiring this is that the government sometimes tells foreign businesses what suppliers it can use and so forth. This is different than the Lenovo case, where the government of China partly owns the company.
It is often the case that a western company will form a partnership/joint venture with the Chinese government, however that would be a separate corporate entity and would run into the same barriers as Lenovo has.
Actually it is kind of a misnomer to call China a communist country anymore. China is merely totalitarian now, and as such I am quite alright with the Lenovo decision, notwithstanding the insincerity surrounding it. Although China has modernised and opened up its economy the US and other countries should do more to pressure China to do the same in government as democracy and freedom are still far too inadequate.
All other computer equipment manufactured in China must be removed too, by this reasoning.
As I read this you're modded 5/insightful...Moderators on crack again...
This reasoning means nothing of the sort. The distinguishing factor is that Lenovo is PARTLY OWNED BY THE CHINESE GOVERNMENT. Apple makes computers in China, as does Dell. However, in those cases there is NO owenership by ANY foreign governments, China or otherwise. This is important because since a foreign government can control the latter companies to disrupt supply of sensitive goods (cutting them off, or sabotaging them).
This is standard Military policy: sensitive equipment of ANY kind cannot be supplied by ANY company that is partly or wholly owned by a foreign GOVERNMENT, and even private foreign ownership is restricted somewhat. As I mentioned in another post AMC had to sell AM General when Renault bought part of AMC because Renault was owned by the French GOVERNMENT, because the military wouldn't stand for relying on its supply of Hummers being influenced by the government of a foreign company.
This includes keyboards, mice, USB hubs, and other PC equipment.
Well although many are made in China, they are not made by companies owned by the Chinese government. If it really matters, a sizeable amount of this stuff is made in Taiwan (NOT recognised as part of Communist China) and other asian countries.
Thank GOD the Blackberries are manufactured in Mexico!..by a Canadian company;) This is not an issue becasue RIM is not a Crown Corporation, not because it is not Chinese. If RIM was a Crown Corporation (government) then I'm sure use of blackberries by US government or military agents wouls also be restricted, or a special agreement would've had to be established.
thinkpads were made in China before, the only difference now is that they are not supervised by a US company.
Well, actually Lenovo Thinkpads are still made in the very same North American factories as IBM Thinkpads were, though I'm sure some components were made in Taiwan or China. Also, Lenovo is now headquartered in the US and has substantial US ownership. Lenovo is not strictly a US companiy, nor is it a Chinese company, though the Chinese government does own nearly 30 percent. Lenovo is a multinational company, like most big companies today. The issue is that a sizeable chunk is owned by a communist government.
Somebody should show this guy the label on the pen he uses, on his reading glasses, on most of the small electronics he owns.
It is pretty easy to determine if a pen or glasses are "safe for classified use", and I bet a lot of small consumer electronics are not approved for classified use too. In any case, this Lenovo descision is 100 percent consistent with how the government and military have handled devices approved for classified use. Here is another notable example:
The "Jeep" was the mainstay of the military for personnel transportation since WWII. Though it was based on a design by Willys-Overland, during the war the identical model was also built by Ford and Bantam (the Ford models were the only ones that had any visible difference at all--all the bolts were embossed with the letter "F", but all the parts on all the Jeeps were interchangeable). After the war Ford and Bantam stopped making Jeeps, and Willys-Overland became the Military's sole supplier of Jeeps and also started to sell it to civillians ("CJ" for "Civillian Jeep"). As time passed, Willy's Overland changed ownership and merged with other companies like Nash and became part of American Motors Corporation (AMC) in the 1960s.
By the 1970s the Jeep was looking long-in-the-tooth and the US military was looking for a beefier replacement. In order to meet contractual obligations AMC set up a new division called "AM General" (because they wanted an independant entity from Jeep that did not sell to civilians) to develop and build what we know as the Hummer. However, in 1978 controlling interest in AMC was sold to Renault which was at the time wholly owned by the French government (Renault was a "Regie Nationale"). As a result about a third of AM General was also owned by the French government. The military promtly "declassified" the Hummer but since there was no alternative readily available AMC was pushed to completely divest AM General to a "real American" ownership (or at least not foreign-government-owned). If AMC did not divest itself of AM General its deal with Renault would've been in jeopardy.
This very closely parallels what happened with Lenovo--its ownership chaged to include some ownership by a foreign government and the milliaty "declassified" it as a supplier as a result. What is different is that alternatives were readily available so rather than blocking IBM's deal or forcing Lenovo to change its ownership they did the easiest thing and bought Dells.
Does that mean his cellphone is a threat to national security!?
Bingo! There isn't a commercially available cellphone approved for classified use by the US military (or the Canadian military IIRC). Besides the fact that most are probably made in China it is probably altogether too easy to tap into conversations on such phones for the military's liking (even today's digital phones, but the old analogue ones were trivially easy to tap).
On a side note, I have an interesting anecdote. I was driving back home from the US across the border into Canada a few months after 9/11. As I approached I got a call so I was talking on the cellphone when the US customs agent/marshal approached my car and very abruptly told me to end the conversation and turn off my cellphone...because it was a security risk. I wasn't even finished saying bye when he said "turn it off NOW sir!"--it agitated him quite a
Sun is endorsing Ubuntu, a Linux-based operating system. There isn't anything indicating that they are favouring any particular software packaging system. Dpkg/apt-get might be the way Ubuntu keeps its own house in order but nothing prevents anyone from installing and maintaining RPM packages on a machine running Ubuntu.
Merits of dpkg aside, SUN may give standards compliance a high priority in its products, and like it or not in order to comply with ISO23360 the operating system MUST support the installation and management of RPMs (it need not be the native package system of the OS, but ALL ISO23360 compliant applicaitons are distributed as RPM packages). SUN could very likely contribute its resources towards making Ubuntu comply with ISO23360. Mark Shuttleworth himself stated that this was a goal for upcoming Ubuntu releases so they would be on the same page. Therefore if the ISO23360 standard gains traction it could mean that installing RPMs on Ubuntu machines could become more common than you'd think, especially for companies like my employer--large enterprises that salivate over anything with "ISO##### Compliant" on it...and guess what SUN's customer base is?
Oh yeah...perhaps I should explain what this ISO23360 is. Basically it is a standard that specifies a set of requirements for Linux-based OSes (file structures, included shared libraries, software packaging format, etc) to allow compliant application software to be easily deployed and executed on any compliant OS without the need to recompile and/or re-package for each OS as is the case today with Linux systems. It is more commonly known as LSB3.1;-)
That $600 means I can play any of the coolest console games
Except there aren't any cool games for these new consoles. Only one of the consoles is even released, and I haven't seen any XBox360 titles that make me want to go out and get a 360. In fact, I've never seen an XBox title of any kind that made me want to go out and get an XBox. Halo? There is a PC version. Halo II or III? I'm not a huge FPS player and it seems more of the same to me. So far, despite the silly name, I think that the Nintendo Wii is the most innovative offering if not the most powerful.
The Xbox offers me roughly the same gaming experience for less money than a gaming PC
You can find a PC for the very same $600 that is quite capable of playing a lot of good games, plus it'll meet all your computing needs too. I think the console makers sense this because when asked to justify their high price, MS and Sony speak a lot about how their machines are so much more than mere game consoles and suggest implicitly that they could be replacements for video players, multimedia PCs and so on. Their software offerings, however, suggest they are not yet serious about anything beyond games just yet. They'd better pay attention to that though, or they might hit a 1983-like patch of trouble.
I don't have to upgrade the video card ever and the accessories are nice.
There are some pretty sweet PC accessories out there, and you most often aren't tied to your PC vendor like you are with console vendors. I haven't upgraded my video card in a few years and I haven't had a problem with the games I've bought. Windows Vista might require an upgrade but it's looking less and less like I'll ever get Vista anyways--My main home computer is Linux and I have an older secondary machine that came with XP already installed which is mostly used by my girlfriend (I may play the odd game).
I'm not sure if others have found the same thing, but it seems as I get older that my interest in new videogames has diminished drastically, but I still quite enjoy some older games, or simpler games in the style of older games. I couldn't care less about Halo III--don't think I'd play it if someone paid me to take a 360 and a copy of the game. However, I'll fire up MAME and play Centipede or Pepper II (was there ever a Pepper I?) or Mr. Do. I might play Quake to get out agression or play Sim City because it seems like a "constructive" waste of time. Maybe that is why none of these new consoles hasn't impressed me at all--they offer nothing to people with my tastes.
a) This is not true, as any basic check of median income would have told you ("median" being the key word, because it's not as skewed by rich folks as "average" income would be).
Median (or any other measure of "average" income) has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not a family lives paycheque to paycheque. The grandparent post is actually bang on, especially in North America but also in the rest of the 1st world too. This is for several reasons:
1) Wages in most 1st world countries have almost, BUT NOT QUITE, kept pace with inflation, so employed people are making more dollars but must spend even more dollars to make ends meet.
2) People are trying to "keep up to the Jones'" again at a pace not seen since Ronald Regan ran the US. Overall "average" families are buying larger homes, driving bigger vehicles, eating more food and so on.
3) Tax load is higher--in the US the gov't has to pay for all those military operations and has a crushing debt. Income taxes are relatively low but the US consumer is nickel-and-dimed to death by state and local taxes and service fees. Sales taxes are particularly bad because they are "regressive" so those who have to spend more of ther income to live effectively pay a higher tax rate (the poorer you are the higher your tax rate basically). Canadians are even more heavily taxed, although most of it comes right off your paycheque.
4) As a result of the above household debt is at a record high--on average US household debt load is ONE HUNDRED PERCENT of disposable income! Basically this means that if you add up the value of all the assets (house, cars, investments, etc) then subtract liabilities (mortgage, credit cards, loans, etc) that the average family is IN THE NEGATIVE by the same amount as their combined annual after-tax income!
The Atari VCS cost $249 when it was first launched. That's more than $800 in today's dollars. You were lucky to find a 19" TV set for $500 - about $1,500 in today's dollars.
Early adopters tended to be upper-middle class or even rich. $800 is still not that much today for them. What is different today is that the Atari was exciting, new and different from anything before--until 1978 basically all you could get was pong and Oddysey (hardwired to play one or a handful of very simple games). The "Fairchild Channel F" was the only cart-based console until the VCS and it was hard to find and had a small library of crappy games. Also The VCS situation was very different from the XBox360 or Wii or PS3. Back then going from pong to being able to play Space Invaders and Breakout (the hottest arcade games of the time) right in your home was amazing. What do we get now with these expensive new machines? Umm...well I guess I can play NFL football 2006 instead of NFL football 2005 and umm..you can see the players sweating and the picture will be clearer...if you buy a new HDTV. There isn't much there motivating average people to run out any buy these next-gen consoles yet. These new consoles are a bit like the Intellivision situation--when the Intellivision II came out it gathered dust on the store shelves because owners of the original Intellivision didn't see anything compelling about it (it looked prettier and talked if you had one of the handful of games that supported it--and the original intellivision could talk too if you got an add-on).
As for the TV, almost nobody had to buy a new one to take advantage of the VCS' capabilities--WAY more people owned 19" colour console sets in 1978 than currently own full-resolution HDTV sets today, and not many people will spend twice the money just to get a TV that makes their console look nice--and besides that crisper image there isn't much out there yet to get excited about.
I'm saying that most people do have the money, they just don't know how to prioritize their purchases.
Maybe they DO know how to prioritise--in fact maybe better than they did in the late 70's and early 80's. As you mentioned there is also
The closer spam looks like legitimate email traffic the harder it is to block them without also blocking some legitimate email.
Your argument makes sense but there is more to it than that. Spammers are starting to catch on that their techniques to thwart mail filters can be used to manipulate those filters to block other people's emails. THAT is still pretty inceniary. Let me explain what I mean:
Some time ago I signed onto the "bluesecurity" website as I was intereste in their counter-spam efforts. As we all know here on/. a top-tier spammer was aggravated by their efforts and managed to get a list of addresses for those who signed onto bluesecurity. I just checked the "junk box" on my email server and have found that in the past 12 hours there have been about 50 emails entitled "bluesecurity.com" with a body containing the WHOIS record for their domain. Apparently, the spammers are already striking back with a vengeance.
Besides annoying the heck out of those unfortunate enough to be on the target list, the thought came to me that this could be a crude attempt to train email filters to block out any (legitimate) correspondence affiliated with bluesecurity.com. I think we're going to see a lot more of this in the future: Spammers for whatever reason select a victim (anti-spam organisations, Microsoft, Symantec, etc) and start sending out massive spams that either repeatedly mention the victim's name, website address domain, etc, or are crafted to look like legitimate correspondence from the victim. The scummy vermin that send out the spam are the same types that go on phishing expeditions so they've had practice imitating others.
Since so many people run email filters, once these filters intercept and mark those messages as spam then legitimate email from their victims are more likely to be blocked as spam. That's all I need is for a spammer to send a few dozen emails that look like Microsoft correspondence, only to have the email filter get trained to filter out REAL email from Microsoft about my MSDN subscription for example.
I hope 3.1 addresses my main gripe with RPMs: an RPM built for Fedora won't install into SUSE because of dependency issues, or vice versa.
Application distributors aren't supposed to build RPMs for Fedora or SuSE or Mandriva; they SHOULD be building RPMs for LSB. ALL RPMs built for LSB should have exactly ONE dependency: the LSB package. The old LSB troll on here from supposed Debian fans alternately makes me chuckle or want to smack then upside the head. Basically they say "but RPM sucks because of dependency hell and DEBs are way better because you can use apt-get--those idiots at the LSB should change the standard to use DEBs instead". HELLO DUMASSES, the whole idea of LSB is that there ARE no dependencies except the LSB standards! Why go through the bother of changing something as fundamental as the package/deployment format just because it is better at handling a problem that would be non-existant in a standards-comliant system!
What is exciting here is that LSB has not really been that "useful" because it was too narrow in scope. With LSB 3.x they have finally given serious attention to the DESKTOP by specifying base requirements for things like X, GTK and (optional at the moment) Qt libraries. Until now, if you wanted to distribute, say, a modern GTK-based GUI application as LSB the install package would have to link in all of that crap and it'd be HUGE. LSB-compliant packages were really only useful for console-based apps or server applications which severely limited the appeal of LSB. Now packaging and distribution LSB apps for both client and server, including rich GUI applications using modern toolkits, is reaching the point where it is actually practical to do so.
Most of the big OS distributors have been on board for awhile now (yes, including some Debian-based ones). Hopefully more big APPLICATION developers will clue in quickly to the fact that LSB is starting to hit its stride.
A pixel is a pixel is a pixel, not a 2 by 2 pixel block or anything else. Yes sometimes pixels are big and other times they are small. THAT'S THE WAY IT'S ALWAYS BEEN. Web developers that are complaining that their websites render too small because of high-definition screens are dumbasses for basing their whole layout on pixels to begin with. Pixel-based layouts bother me just as much as flash-heavy and/or over-animated websites. The fact that web developers insiste on relying on pixel based websites almost makes me reconsider my stance against capital punishment. Seriously.
If you want to use fixed layouts then use pt or em. THAT IS WHAT THEY ARE FOR! They are always supposed to be the same size--in particular pt is supposed to be 1/72 of an inch regardless of screen resolution, and user agents can allow viewersd to scale at will if they wish (view at over 100% perhaps, if you have difficulty seeing, or 50% to let people like you with a fetish for all things small see more at once). You can also use inches, centimetres or millimetres of you don't like using print media conventions. Problem solved--your website is now independent of screen resolution.
The ONLY time any web developer should EVER consider using px is if you need to align with a bitmap. Even then it is rarely needed because you can scale a bitmap to the above-mentioned units anyways. If bitmaps look ugly scaled then maybe the creators of user agents should put a bit more effort into doing a better job of scaling them, and improve (or add) support for vector images (the world would be a much better place if the craptacular IE had at least basic native support for SVG--Shame on ME, and kudos to the Mozilla team for stepping up in that department).
Their problems were that they wanted features they weren't finding in Linux, but did find in Windows.
WRONG. The problem was that they weren't aware that Linux-based systems acutally COULD do what they wanted and a Microsoft marketroid came along and showed them how it could be dome with Windows. Both examples of the reversion to Microsoft showed all the hallmarks of "you don't knw what you don't know"--not only did their IT people not know how to make Linux work for them--they weren't even fully aware of the capabilities of open source systems.
The articles mention one comany migrated to Linux 3 years ago, the other seven years ago. Did they really keep up with the fast-moving world of open source? In the anecdote about the company that stuck with Linux there was a fairly siginificant mention of upgrading both hardware and software, but in the other cases little to nothing was said about upgrading. It is entirely possible that the latter company was still runnning on their original Mandrake 6.x (or whatever it was in 1999) platform. Were they expecting their Linux systems to be magically immortal? If they implemented a Microsoft system in 1999, do you really think they'd be happy with NT4 and the big pile of manure that passed for Exchange Server at the time? I seriously think not.
I think the final solution of migrating (back) to another platform was too drastic, and that these companies dropped the ball when it came to examining the open source alternative. Three passwords to log into a VPN? Email boxes stored on clients? Lack of collaberation tools? COME ON! You can set up a Linux server to allow a Windows client to log in without any extra passwords. It isn't hard to set up a secure IMAP server using Postfix to manage mail server-side either, and there are "Exchange replacements" that may fit the bill if you need to do mare than just manage email centrally. There are a bazillion "portal frameworks" out there, and Subversion can be used as a collaberation tool for more than just computer code. I know this can all be done because I've done all of that myself. These people are lazy and uncreative and didn't even try to find a more elegant approach to solving their problems. Instead they let a Microsoft salesman sell them a sledgehammer to drive in their 10-penny nails.
These stories also underscore a problem with the Linux community as well, however. Microsoft made themselves readily available. They have an education programme that turns out MCSEs faster than rats can breed. The Windows brand is everywhere and they make it very clear with every release "what's new". Where were the Red Hat and Novell people when these Linux shops were struggling? Why isn't red-hat more agessively marketing and expanding RCHE certification? What about LPI? And as far as marketing goes, IBM has done a bit but Linux is far from front and centre, and the marketing presence of Red Hat and Novell is next to nothing in comparison to Microsoft's mega-campaigns that contain heavy dollops of information (or mis-information in some cases). Yes, MS is the big man on campus and has the resources to pull all this off the best, but it's going to take a huge marketing and support effort by the Linux community to make sure we not only convert more people to Linux but to retain them as well.
I want to know who has a job where they have so much extra time on their hands that they can debug the source code of their database product.
Nobody except the active contributers to the RDBMS I'm guessing. Certainly not be. But I'll tell you my personal experience with PostgreSQL and how it being open source directly benefited me:
I was doing a project involving PgSQL many years ago (v6.2 I think) to manage a small inventory database. There was a problem that looked like a bug in PgSQL rather than a configuration issue (I think it was causing VACUUM to fail among other things but my memory fails me). What I clearly remember was how I resolved the issue, and it is the first time that the benefits of open source directly affected me and when I becane clearly sold on open source.
I had given up and since there wasn't a company to turn to I looked for contact emails in what passed for the docs at the time (they are MUCH better now) and on the website. I emailed one of the core developers and described my problem. He emailed me back the next day and thanked me for my feedback and said he had a few other reports of problems somewhat similar to mine. He also ATTACHED THE SOURCE CODE OF THE PATCH he had been working on that was not yet in the release on the website! I applied the patch and recompiled and bingo...it was back to normal!
Now I was (still am) far from a guru C programmer but as with a lot of people I can stumble my way around makefiles and GCC and patches and so forth, and I did have time to recompile PgSQL. I can also (at the instruction of one of the developers) to traces and such and send in the results and THEY can do the debugging with my help. If I was using Microsoft SQL Server and had a similar problem I'd be screwed: I'd have to call clueless tech support, or wander around the KB articles and hope to find the solution, and in this case I'd probably find a useledd KB article along the lines of "Microsoft has acknowledged this to be an issue and will provide a solution in the next available hotfix" telling me to do some kludgy, unacceptable workaround in the meantime, which could be days, or weeks...or maybe even never. I certainly would NEVER have the ear of a Microsoft programmer who wrote or reviewed the code as a lowly intern-type doing a small experimental project.
So there you go...I'm (a) not an "elite programmer", (b) never been part of the PostgreSQL team beyond exchanging emails with a team member, and (c) though some may say I am a nerd I moved out of my parents' home when I was 17 and never lived in their basement. Despite that I have indeed directly benefited from source code availability for software that I did not write.
My D-Link DSL604t is Linux based too, and so is my PDA
These comments speak volumes about the bulk of the/. audience--mostly younger males in IT. These folks think embedded means what controls their DVD player, television set, TiVo, PDA, router, etc.
While those are certainly a major portion of the embedded market, a large part of the embedded market (perhaps even larger than the consumer electronics segment) is outside the realm of consumer electronics. Think industrial automation, automotive control systems, logistics (barcode, RFid, etc).
Take the industrial automation market--GE, Siemens and Rockwell(Allen Bradley) are the GM, DaimlerChrysler and Ford of that market (the big three). Look at their lines of PLCs(Programmble Logic Controllers). How many of their PLC processors run Linux? EXACTLY ZERO. You have to understand the history of this market. Although PLCs are basically specialised computers, the design philosophy is based on a very different set of priorities. Things are kept simpler, more robust and hard real-time is usually essential. Customers demand 25 years or more for support and spare parts availability (the 7-year lifespan of Windows products is laughable in comparison). Change is slow and evolutionary.
Linux is capble of the task (there are a handful of smaller players offering RTLinux-based PLCs) but automation people are reluctat to change what works and suspicious of unconventional design choices. Just look at the most common way of programming PLCs--ladder logic. Yes, to this day typical PLC programmers are most comfortable using a graphical language that mimics engineering drawigs of electromehanical relay circuits commonly used before ENIAC blew its first valve, with little symbols for contactors and switches and coils.
This industry is also notoriously proprietary. Every vendor has invented its own, closed-design protocol stack and one were compatible with each other (like home computers of the 1980s). It took about a decade longer than the PC industry to wake up and participate in more open standards like Devicenet, Controlnet, FOUNDATION FieldBus etc
Contrast this to the history of Linux: it was wide open from the start, has evolved and advanced very rapidly, and certain aspects of it change often over time. This doesn't always give Linux a technical disadvantage, but it does mean it is a harder sell to the control systems crowd.
I'm sure that PLCs don't sell nearly as fast as iPods or cellphones ut they sell for a lot more money per unit, and they sell for a much longer period of time, but I'm willing to bet that is a big reason Linux remains a minor player in the embedded space. I think it is gradually changing though--for example companies partnered with Rockwell are producing Linux-based modules that fit in Allen Bradley PLC chassis for data collection and so on, and with the emergence of commodity IT technology on the factory floor (in the form of Windows-based operator interfaces, MSSQL and Oracle databases to collect process data, etc) engineers have been forced to face the instability and "paradigm shift" anyways. I think that the market is reaching a point of being more comfortable with looking at more "radical" alternatives like Linux.
I've never been diagnosed with any sort of disorder but from time to time I apparently exhibit "eccentric" behaviour. It isn't so much now but when I was younger. Among other things, it sometimes looks like I have ADD and it'll seem like I've zoned out or something has distracted me. Sometimes that is the case but very often I'm still listening or actually interested in what that person is saying. It drives regualr people up the wall so it'd probably hopelessly confuse an autistic person with this new device.
Anyways I'm not sure if some egghead has invented a syndrome to describe my quirks, but I think that every single person is just a bit off in some way and to varying degrees will react unconventionally. Heck...the problem is even simpler than that. What if the autistic person encounters a blind person, or someone with a facial palsy who is physically incapable of "looking interested"? I think it'll be a long time before there is a device sophisticated enough to interpret people's reactions with consistency (that'll only happen when we've figured out how to create a truly telepathic device rather than one that works on physichal cues).
With age I've become more perceptive of how people react to me and it probably helped make me more "well adjusted". I do notice, however, that I have a harder time among people who are physically and/or emotionally less mature (teenagers especially but generally under 25 years old). It's hard to describe but I'll more often get a look like I've just told a joke and they don't get it, or like the dog looking into the old RCA Victrola. In different (older) company I get vastly different reaction. How would an autistic person handle this? I thought that a person with autism tended to think like cats think--they learn that this action produces that reaction (or am I wrong there?). So, wouldn't it quite frustrate such a person if they behaved a certain way around, say, a teenaged girl and the device buzzed while the same thing wouldn't set off the device with a 50 year old man?
The start of the tree was well before that...try DOS 1.0. Each subsequent major version of DOS would be a branch of that tree (2.x, 3.4, 4.x, 5.x, 6.x). Windows 9x and Me versions were just more branches that just happened to integrate a GUI and 32-bit extensions to DOS:
Windows 95 == DOS 7.0 Windows 95A/B/C == DOS 7.1 Windows 98/98SE == DOS 7.11 Windows Me == DOS 8.0
Of course Vista will suck, they are messing with the kernel.
Whether Vista will suck is a point of debate. However, from what I've seen MS is not "messing with" the NT kernel in any meaningful way. They are, however, messing with the driver model...but in a good way (moving video and print-engine driver stuff out of kernel space). This may affect compatibility or stability with older hardware and kernel-space drivers (which I heard were supposed to still work in a pinch but won't be supported by MS) but architecturally it is a Good Thing (R) (TM).
As much as most of us wish for Linux, OSX or something else to replace windows, its not happening on the desktop. [...] Lets face it, Linux is missing some key software areas like Tax Preperation software (finance in general), games, Itunes compatible players (even if its illegal in US), etc.
More like "it hasn't happened yet". The Linux desktop (in both the GNOME and KDE camps but GNOME in particular) has hit its stride and has really been moving forward in the last couple of years. I moved my main desktop at home to 100% linux and haven't had the need to use Windows for anything at all since then--it already meets all my personal needs. I have to do my taxes for the first time since making the move, but I may not need to relent and use a Windows PC even now--I'm going to examine some web-based alternatives that have appeared in the last couple of years (this is in Canada--not sure what options exist for taxpayers in the US or other nations).
It really depends on your needs. Not everybody desperately needs iTunes, and a lot of people are content to entertain themselves with the occasional game of AisleRiot or Frozen Bubble or whatever. There are a lot of casual computer users out there that would be well-served by Linux, and if distribution vendors play their cards right they could establish the Linux platform in that market and finally draw the appropriate level of attention of application developers. It's a challenge but it isn't impossible, and the longer MS stumbles around the bigger the opportunity for Linux (and Apple and whoever).
t's easy to ignore that "fact" since it isn't true at all. Windows 2000 (1999) Windows XP (2001) Windows Server 2003 (2003) [blah blah]
(well, Windows 2000 was actually released about 7 years ago..not five...but whatever)
Welcome to the Microsoft Ice Cream Parlour! We've introduced tons of new exciting flavours of ice cream in the past five years:
* Vanilla * French Vanilla * Vanilla topped with fudge * Vanilla with sprinkles * Vanilla with fudge and sprinkles * Vanilla with a cherry on top
I'm sorry, but I really haven't seen any meaningful innovation from Microsoft at all in the 21st century...especially when compared to the progress Apple and the open source community have eachm ade in the same amount of time. Linux has not only caught up in "copying" its closed competitors, it is now entering a point where it is leading the pack in some respects (it is in a position to beat MS to release of a 3D accelerated desktop, it is substantially ahead of Microsoft in high-performance computing/clustering, etc).
Microsoft's slowness-to-innovate isn't just limited to the operationg system either. Let's examine their database offerings in the 21st century shall we?
* SQL Server 2000 * umm....3 service packs?...sorry I got nothin'... * SQL Server 2005
Now lets look at PostgreSQL's milestone releases in the same time frame:
And with each of those major releases there were 3 to 10+ minor releases to improve the products stability and performance. MySQL has undergone similarly rapid development and improvement and has gone from 3.x to 5.0.
How much longer can Microsloth rely on its monopoly status to compensate for its relatively glacial pace of innovation? I think it's really difficult to guess, but I think there is a tipping point where MS could quite abruptly move from a point of stable stagnation/slow growth to a situation of rapid decline. This could happen as soon as next year or (probably more likely) with the next major release of Windows or Office after Vista or Office 2007. I can envision people being tired of the sliding schedules and seeing less justification to upgrade than ever before leading to a disastrously disappointing major product release leading to this rapid decline.
Of course, MS could pull its butt out of the fire just in time. It wouldn't be the first time MS has had to wake up and do a major refocus after all...
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> It's not like they can pay large percentages of the industry to switch over.
What makes you think they can't?
Little things like...oh...the Sherman Antitrust Act, anti-dumping provisions in the WTO, and likely future court rulings and legislation that might result from that sort of behaviour (especially from the EU and Asian countries that are slowly growing more hostile to Microsoft).
It is one thing to offer your your software for free as has been done with IE since the start. Even when Microsoft moved IE from the "Plus! Pack" onto the Windows install CD when they supplanted Win95 with Win95A there was not much to complain about. MS' practices became questionable by the time Win98 came out, when IE became a required part of the OS install and applications started coming out with IE dependencies as this put competitors at a disadvantage. I say questionable because even after a decade it is still a point of debate if such practices should be regulated.
With Windows Server, IIS is right on the OS install CD and is increasingly integrated with the OS and other server software (SQL reporting services, sharepoint, team foundation server, etc). This is reaching the point of being questionable behaviour, however I think the competition has accepted that MS has decided such things as web browsers and HTTP servers are "components" of desktop and server OSes respectively--and it is a bit difficult to complain about it when Linux distributions almost universally bundle such applications with their OS installs too.
as they've shown in the past, they're not at all averse to taking large financial hits to ruin a competitor
Absolutely. However, selling at a loss or giving software away for free (as in beer) is one thing. Bribing your competitor's customers to switch, especially when your competitor is non-commercial, is not only ethically and morally unacceptable to most people--it is almost always illegal too. The most definite line that would be crossed is going from discounts, to give-aways, to actually offering money or gifts to potential customers. At my place of employment, it is made very clear to everyone that exchanging anything but the most nominal gift with potential customers--even if it doesn't involve luring them from a competitor--is an offence punishable by immediate dismissal even on the first offence.
Sure, until your PHB strolls in and declares that "we're switching to Microsoft!".
I feel fortunate that the economic climate where I'm at right now is a job-hunter's market and a person can be selective. Even if it weren't, however, if *my* PHB were to just stroll in and pronounce that we were making major, disruptive IT infrastructure changes without previous consultation with others just because some salesbot from MS offered him some swag then I'd immedately set about updating my resume and finding work elsewhere. Not only do I not like at a job where the opinions and concerns of employees are not considered--it has also been my experience that organisations with managers that "stroll in and declare" such things are destined to fail if they do not change. This goes both ways, by the way--I think that it would be equally as bad if the PHB at an all-MS shop were to stroll in and declare "we are switching to Linux" without any apparent good reason.
Sony lost out, only because of price, not quality.
My dad has always been a fan of new technology. When we got a satellite dish (no cable in rural areas) we also decided to get a VCR so we could tape movies and such (we had a fairly advanced system with a high-gain C-Band LNB that worked with an "amazingly small" 8 foot dish!). After seeing a noticeable difference in picture quality we decided to get a Sony Betamax VCR despite the slightly higher cost.
It didn't take too long to become frustrated with the short recording time--I believe it topped out at 120 minutes, and there was a LOT of stuff that we recorded that ran over that. We did find longer tapes eventially that held 180 minutes that helped quite a bit, but they were harder to find and more expensive (over 50% more expensive even though they were only 50% longer). "But wait--I'm sure Beta tapes could hold more". Yes they could--but not when it first came out. Betamax ended up with three playback/record speeds (Beta I/II/III) like VHS, however The Beta III record speed was not on our machine (it wasn't on any at the beginning IIRC).
Eventually we had problems with our Sony VCR--it would play back but when recording the video would drop out--at first for a few frames, then for seconds to minutes, always at random intervals. We replaced it with a Sanyo--another Beta because of our existing library. This VCR could record in B-III so we now had an ample amount of time even on the most common-sized tape. However, VHS had gotten a foothold by then and aside from price, I recall the REAL selling point was the much bigger recording time.
There was another issue too which affected our alliegence to the Beta format even before it became too hard to find pre-recorded content. Eventaully our second Beta VCR suffered from the EXACT SAME RECORDING PROBLEM as the older Sony did. Perhaps this is anecdotal, but the repairmen said the same thing--that these problems with recording crpooed up more often in Beta VCRs than VHS, regardless of the make or model. So Beta VCRs might've had better PICTURE quality, VHS had better HARDWARE quality (more reliable). Given the delay in Blu-Ray player releases due to last-minute "extra testing", as well as the delays in the PS3 (and speculation that it is due to problems with the Blu-Ray player) it sounds like there could be some stubborn reliability problems, and with HD-DVD players and movies already out the pressure to get to market could possibly mean Blu-Ray players might be pushed out the door before they should be.
Of course it is much too early to predict a winner in this format war, and they may coexist for so long that both will be supplanted by an even newer technology before one camp wins. In any case there are a few uncomfortable signs that Blu-Ray has lost its edge from a market-competitveness advantage.
...when your competitor has it too.
The salesperson will tell her, "With Blu-Ray every movie fits on a single disk. With HD-DVD you will need two disks for each movie.
And the salesperson will be full of crap. Single-layer HD-DVDs hold 15 GB--more than three times what single layer DVDs hold. If you encoded the HD video using the same MPEG2 format used by standard DVD you'd get about 75 minutes of HD video on a single layer HD-DVD--not enough to fit most movies. However, the compression used on both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray is more efficient, allowing for much more video to fit on a single disc. You could easily fit double the video as a result (2.5 hours) and perhaps even more (up to 4 hours).
With the release of dual-layer HD-DVDs there will be much more space than required for any movie out there, allowing for more extended features/enhanced content. Even Sony themselves concede they don't envision too many movies that would even fill one single-layered Blu-Ray disc, much less a dual-layered HD-DVD.
Which one do you think she will buy?
If she listens to the full-o-crap salesman then probably the Blu-Ray machine. Then she'll be upset when she finds out she payed almost double for the player and finds out that HD-DVD movies DO come on single discs, she can't notice any difference in picture quality and only a fraction of movie releases take advantage of the extra Blu-Ray capacity to deliver extra content.
This is Beta vs. VHS all over again, and perhaps Sony thinks that since it has the capacity edge (where VHS had much longer playing/recording times) that it has HD-DVD beat. Sony would be wrong. Firstly, when Betamax first came out the best reording time was something like 120 minutes (The "Beta III" speed and longer tapes came out later allowing for 3 or 4 hours on a tape, but by then VHS was out). Consumers could've forgiven a smaller capacity, but not one so small that they might have a hard time fitting a movie on one tape. This time around, it isn't too-small vs. larger-than-needed, it is large-enough vs. larger-then needed. Secondly, Sony is repeating stupid mistakes by insisting on too-greedy licensing terms and using more complex technology. Aunt Bea might not like the idea of switching discs for some longer movies (if it were true), but if it means saving $500 on the player and a few dollars in the cost of a video she might not think it such a problem.
Most software is non-critical, and the software that is critical (flight control systems) are developed with security and reliability in mind
Just becasue the failure of some software doesn't maim or kill people, or is not the direct cause of millions of dollars in losses, doesn't mean that consumers shouldn't be warranted against defects. Commercial software is notoriously lax in comparison to most other consumer goods--for example, about all Microsoft warrants against is damaged physical media. The law is significantly more stringent for minimum warranties on physical goods, even "non-critical" items. Your car isn't just warranted against safety-related problems for example (to bring up that tired "if Windows was a car" analogy, if Windows were a car it would not be covered under warranty if an engine flaw caused it to stall every 10 minuts because there are no performace guaranteed). The least they can do is give you a refund for the cost of the software.
There has to be a reasonable balance, and right now the software industry is "unbalanced". End users certainly don't demand "ciritcal-systems" reliability from their home computer's productivity applications--they just want value for their dollar. If I go to Home Depot and buy an electric drill that falls apart due to poor design or manufacture I expect I should be able to take it back because it cannot properly drill holes or drive screws. On average commercial software is more expensive than a drill, however I have a much harder time returning it for refund because it crashes my computer when I try to use it for the purpose it was meant for (say, I cannot e-file my taxes with the tax program or something, when it says right on the box it can do the job). It's not like we want millions in liability coverage included.
Does this jeopardise Free software? I don't think it does at all. If you download free install packages, and especially if you download source for free then compile it yourself, I can't see how any warranty at all can be justified--you take your chances because you get more than what you paid for (which was just your time). However, I'd expect a modest level of warranty for functional deficiencies for SuSE or Red Hat for their commercially distrubuted versions of Linux and other apps, just the same as I do from Microsoft. Is a full refund of purchase price on brand new merchandise really too much to ask for?
In cases where a consultant or systems integrator has made use of open tools, it it they--NOT the original code contributors--who should hold responsible, since it was the consultant who had the job of selecting, modifying and deploying the system (they should review for fitness of purpose). Basically this is the case already--where I work we are responsible for making sure our systems perform as expected, even though our software runs on a Microsoft platform and it is sometimes Microsoft's defects that are the root cause. The reason we are liable is because we made the decision to use the Windows platform and we were responsible for testing and making sure defects in 3rd party software were not critical.
Another poster mentioned the case of collapsing suspended walkways at a luxury hotel in the early 80s. The engineering firm and supplier of the walkway supporting rods were held liable and paid dearly. In the equivalent software situation the liable parties might be the IBM consultant or the designer/developer of a purpose-built, custom software component. Suing Linus Torvalds because a defective system failed due to a Linux kernel bug would be like suing the company that mined and processed the steel to make the rods--because it is one component in a complex assembly of diverse components and should've been adequately tested.
And you can be sure Microsoft wouldn't be one of them, or, if they did, they'd do it all wrong.
.net FrontPage and ASP development tools spewed out atrocious, non-compliant code and ActiveX has been a sourge on the Web. In the early days on Vista development MS boldly declared teh web browser as a distinct application obsolete and abandoned new IE development. Microsoft has, as a result, suffered the consequenses (buggy, insecure software, backlash from users and web developers for its inconsistent rendering behaviour, resurgence of Mozilla browsers, etc).
Well, we have lived through this with the WWW and we still have standards. Yes, Microsoft was involved. Yes, Microsoft did it all wrong and yes, many IE quirks became defacto standards. However, there is still a standard and at a fundamental level it is still adhered to by all imporatant players. And guess what? Microsoft is being forced to step in line, albeit slowly. Pre
Now, MS has had to admit they still need a browser and are readying a long-overdue major release of IE and with every version of Visual Studio.Net the HTML generated by ASP.Net apps is more compliant and cross-browser compatible. Standards DO have an effect and given the climate MS is now in (with extra regulatory scruitiny and a slowly but surely growing competition) they may still botch the implementation, but they wouldn't blatanly flout standards like they have in years past.
..but email could be made WAY closer to perfect than it is now.
Let's take video games as the paradigm.
Let's not. Email communication is not in any way like some new PC or console game. The videogames of which you speak are like DVDs--they are published and distributed using archaic methods (boxing and shipping silver plastic discs to stores and homes all over the place) by companies that are propping up an obsolete business model with artificial barriers like copy protection and overzealous copyright laws. Email communication is about electronic distribution and the content is not what is being sold. In a sense, if the videogame industry was email then business would be trying to make money by selling email messages themselves rather than email accounts/mailbox space/connectivity. The two aren't really comparable.
And yet days after release, and sometimes prior to release, their code is hacked, cracked, and distributed.
Perhaps you should compare with ecommerce or banking sites instead of videogames. SSL/TLS encrypted and authenticated communication has been used on secure sites for ages, and it has NEVER been completely compromised. Yes, people have demonstrated that it is crackable with massive computing power, and in response all we had to do was use a larger key. Sure we hear about how people had their credit card numbers stolen from some ecommerce or web banking site, but it has NEVER been because someone defeated the security technology--it has ALWAYS been human error or incompetence (like useing real card info as "test data" or storing the info unencrypted on a database server exposed to the 'net, all the way to banks leaving unshredded sensitive documents in dumpsters or hackers putting keyloggers on cruddy Windows boxes to transmit the info in the clear to their own servers.
How exactly does this new email system stop phishing? Oh, right, it can't.
Well, make sure the certificate is legitimate--those are much harder to spoof than the URL or "from" address. With smart design of the email client (ie an alert written in plain english for the "severely normal" user) we can drastically reduce the problem. Right now people have to fiddle with PGP or GPG and add-on plugins and crap. A new system could have encryption and authentication built into the standard such that every single email could have a signature.
How exactly does this new email system stop users from clicking executables thinking that they are going to see nudie pictures of Katie Holmes?
Ultimately it can't, but it CAN use mimetypes more effectively/be smarter about analysing file content/have integrated support for digitally signed attachments. If someone is such a jello-head that they would get an attachment marked "Executable program, no digital signature" in an email marked as "message not signed, origin unknown" and STILL think they're going to see Katie's titties then they are too f*cking stupid to be online.
How does this new email stop virii?
The problem with *viruses* (people, please stop referring to more than one virus as virii, that's a made up word) is at a lower level than email. The problem is that the most predominant operating system is severely flawed architecturally. There are more viruses discovered in a day for Windows than have been for Linux in the entire history of Linux, and Linux people send and receive plenty of email. Even factoring in the big difference in market share the difference is staggering.
Email can be made virtually virus proof--the problem is that there is no officially standardised way of verifying/signing/managing security of attachments in today's email. Any tools that exist are one-off bolt-ons and are not seamless. An email message is not an executable and any data in the body of a message should not be executable binary code. If an executable is attached it should not be executable until it is decoded and detached, and there should be safeguards to alert the user to fake "katie'
Each of the items I listed are too large and complex, and are beyond repair, but in the same respect could NEVER be recreated in a reasonable time frame.
Two questions:
1) By suggesting email "could NEVER be recreated in a reasonable timeframe" you are inferring that a reinvented email system must be complex. Why would that be? We don't have to re-invent security, authentication, encryption from scratch for use especially for email--we already have the technology and use it extensively (HTTP(S), LDAP, Kerberos, SSH, etc). What is missing in email is an elegant integration of these technologies.
2) Even if architecting a next-generation email system would take a long time, why would that be a problem? What would be a "reasonable" timeframe? Personally I don't think that a W3C-like standards body would take more than 5 years to craft a usable standard, and by the time it hit 1.0 there would already be a lot of early implementations. Sure it would take a long time to adopt, but there could be email gateways like there was between the internet and old-school nets like Fidonet, and those gateways can handle the spam and other crap before they hit any "new and improved" email servers.
When something gets as broken as email people are more motivated to fix it. There are already some interesting ideas out there that could catch on...
criticising MS for favouring security over..... well anything
/. think more of implementing a secure design at an architectural level. As the author mentions, much of what Microsoft does is "protecting users from their own stupidity". While this addresses security, it is not an effective solution to security problems. While Microsoft has made some effective security changes at lower levels (services off by default, user vs. kernel space for drivers, an installer service that runs under a more appropriate security policy, etc) there is still a lot about the upcoming Windows that is architecturally flawed. Instead of making design changes MS has elected to take the band-aid approach of trying to direct users away from pitfalls due to these architectural flaws (firewalls set to "maximum nag" mode, anti-virus to the hilt, "are you sure" dialogue boxes warning of potentially dangerous consequenses every few clicks...).
It isn't that favouring security is the problem, because it is not. MS has finally got priorities straight. The problem is what KIND of security on which they have elected to place their emphasis. I think that many of us propellerheads on
Perhaps after another bets build or two MS will have tuned things to make Vista more pleasant to use. However, I expect that for novice computer users Vista will make them frustrated, intimidated and perhaps even afraid of the computer. I can just see how a WWW surfing experience would go in spiffy new Vista-enhanced IE7 (especially given the typical kinds of sites that novice users end up stumbling upon):
*MSN message pops up from buddy with a link to get "these cute little smilies"
*noobie clicks on link and IE7 opens with gaudy, blinky ad-ridden website
*IE7 pops up a status message saying "The website you are viewing is trying to launch 7 pop-ups. Do you want to see them?
*noobie has enough clue to say no. A modal dialogue pops up saying "This website is trying to install an unsigned control . Unsigned software can be used by malicious users to steal sensitive information or damage your computer. Review the information below carefully before proceeding ". The information below states "This whiz-bang addon will enhance your cmputer's performance and make searching more effective by delivering you the latest special offers from our industry-leading partners! You must install this to make full use of our software!"
*noobie is confused--is this bad or good? He clicks Yes. An adware BHO is installed but noobie gets cool MSN smilies! OMG! Ponies!
*Vista Enchanced Security (R) (TM) springs to action. Firewall brings up dialogue "The Application 'Whiz-Bang' is trying to open an internet connection . Permit? ". At the same time, Antispyware pops up "AntiSpyware has determined the application 'Whiz-Bang' may be spyware . Do you want to disable this application? .
*noobie is frustrated--he said he wanted no pop-ups but Vista has "popped-up" three windows in quick succession.
I know all these things can happen in XP if SP2 is on it and it is configured a certain way. However, I suspect Vista will arrive from the factory with all of the MS features that are currently downloadable add-ons bundled right in. Furthermore, I suspect that default settings will be at or near "maximum annoyance" mode. I think after enough of these experiences of continual confirmation box bombardment and warnings about what evil things might happen to your computer if you proceed will make Mr/Ms Noobie either too afraid to do much with their computer, or determined to learn how to disable all these features (after which time Noobie neglects to learn how to keep things enabled without the nagging, resulting in a comprimised machine).
While improvements in Vista will certainly reduce the frequency of serious, high-profile security incidents it'll be a slow reduction and many years before we are at an acceptable state of affairs.
However, I can't even begin to grasp the variation in licenses associated with linux programs. Anyone else as clueless as me?
Pretty much everyone is clueless to some degree except for the author of the license. However it sounds like you are even more clueless regarding propretary licensing, especially for the MS Windows platform. If you DID have a clue about licensing in the proprietary world and actually *read* the EULAs (end-user LICENSE agreements) that come with your Windows OS and software then you wouldn't be complaining about licensing under Linux--you'd be heaping praise on it for SIMPLIFYING licensing.
Let me explain: A typical Linux distribution (sorry--GNU/Linux) is comprised mostly by GPLed software, and most often entirely out of OSI-approved licenses in the case of non-commercial distros. This means that there are common characteristics to all the licenses and a user can (relatively) easily determin what their rights are--and generally the end user has a lot of rights (re-distribution and copying, view and modify source code, etc). Furthermore, as new releases are issued of most open source software the license terms remain the same.
Contrast this with Windows and proprietary Windows-based applications: Microsoft alone--ONE VENDOR--has DOZENS of different licenses. Microsoft often changes its licenses with each new software release too! Furthermore, while open software can sometimes be distributed under "dual licenses" like mySQL, Microsoft has MULTIPLE licenses for many of its products simultaneously. Often these are variants of a standard EULA but there are different details for each one. Win95, Win98, Win98SE, WinMe, WinNT 3.51, NT 4, 2Kpro, 2KServer, XP, 2K3 Server ALL have slightly different EULAs, and in fact the EULAs are different for the SAME EXACT PRODUCT depending on if you are a retail customer, OEM customer or volume licesne customer. You know how that EULA box sometimes pops up during Windows Update? Guess what? Sometimes when you click OK you are letting MS add, change or take away some of the rights you were originally granted when you purchased the software--without compensation! Throw in other vendors that all pull the same EULA crap and you've got an impossible nightmare in terms of licensing.
Given the restrictive nature of typical proprietary EULAs the associated software also contains enforcement mechanisms. I'm sure all but the very casual PC user is painfully familiar with "Product Activation"...
Contrast this with Linux, where the vast majority of open software is licensed under a dozen or less OSI-approved licenses that all share a farily straightforward set of common characteristics. If you think about it, this isn't a disadvantage for Linux at all--it is an ADVANTAGE. In a way, what LSB is trying to do with Linux software distribution is something along the lines of what the FSF and OSI have had some success doing with licensing. We have a baseline for what constitutes open source software licensing that is well established, and if we could have a similar baseline for software distribution so a person can say "this package is an LSB package so I can easily install it on my LSB-compatible OS" then it would be a great step towards catching up to Microsoft's market share.
Now Marcellus has to get "The Wolf" to help us scrape all those bits of Jack Valenti's brain off the floor, walls and ceiling. It won't be a pleasant day at all...
Under Chinese law, aren't most Chinese businesses somewhat partly owned by the Chinese government?
Well, by definition a Chinese business is owned by the Chinese and as such most are government owned. However Apple, Dell, General Motors, Walmart, etc. are NOT Chinese companies and thus there is no ownership by the Chinese government, and no Chinese law states that the government must own a stake in any foreign business operating within China. The closest they come to requiring this is that the government sometimes tells foreign businesses what suppliers it can use and so forth. This is different than the Lenovo case, where the government of China partly owns the company.
It is often the case that a western company will form a partnership/joint venture with the Chinese government, however that would be a separate corporate entity and would run into the same barriers as Lenovo has.
Actually it is kind of a misnomer to call China a communist country anymore. China is merely totalitarian now, and as such I am quite alright with the Lenovo decision, notwithstanding the insincerity surrounding it. Although China has modernised and opened up its economy the US and other countries should do more to pressure China to do the same in government as democracy and freedom are still far too inadequate.
All other computer equipment manufactured in China must be removed too, by this reasoning.
..by a Canadian company ;) This is not an issue becasue RIM is not a Crown Corporation, not because it is not Chinese. If RIM was a Crown Corporation (government) then I'm sure use of blackberries by US government or military agents wouls also be restricted, or a special agreement would've had to be established.
As I read this you're modded 5/insightful...Moderators on crack again...
This reasoning means nothing of the sort. The distinguishing factor is that Lenovo is PARTLY OWNED BY THE CHINESE GOVERNMENT. Apple makes computers in China, as does Dell. However, in those cases there is NO owenership by ANY foreign governments, China or otherwise. This is important because since a foreign government can control the latter companies to disrupt supply of sensitive goods (cutting them off, or sabotaging them).
This is standard Military policy: sensitive equipment of ANY kind cannot be supplied by ANY company that is partly or wholly owned by a foreign GOVERNMENT, and even private foreign ownership is restricted somewhat. As I mentioned in another post AMC had to sell AM General when Renault bought part of AMC because Renault was owned by the French GOVERNMENT, because the military wouldn't stand for relying on its supply of Hummers being influenced by the government of a foreign company.
This includes keyboards, mice, USB hubs, and other PC equipment.
Well although many are made in China, they are not made by companies owned by the Chinese government. If it really matters, a sizeable amount of this stuff is made in Taiwan (NOT recognised as part of Communist China) and other asian countries.
Thank GOD the Blackberries are manufactured in Mexico!
thinkpads were made in China before, the only difference now is that they are not supervised by a US company.
Well, actually Lenovo Thinkpads are still made in the very same North American factories as IBM Thinkpads were, though I'm sure some components were made in Taiwan or China. Also, Lenovo is now headquartered in the US and has substantial US ownership. Lenovo is not strictly a US companiy, nor is it a Chinese company, though the Chinese government does own nearly 30 percent. Lenovo is a multinational company, like most big companies today. The issue is that a sizeable chunk is owned by a communist government.
Somebody should show this guy the label on the pen he uses, on his reading glasses, on most of the small electronics he owns.
It is pretty easy to determine if a pen or glasses are "safe for classified use", and I bet a lot of small consumer electronics are not approved for classified use too. In any case, this Lenovo descision is 100 percent consistent with how the government and military have handled devices approved for classified use. Here is another notable example:
The "Jeep" was the mainstay of the military for personnel transportation since WWII. Though it was based on a design by Willys-Overland, during the war the identical model was also built by Ford and Bantam (the Ford models were the only ones that had any visible difference at all--all the bolts were embossed with the letter "F", but all the parts on all the Jeeps were interchangeable). After the war Ford and Bantam stopped making Jeeps, and Willys-Overland became the Military's sole supplier of Jeeps and also started to sell it to civillians ("CJ" for "Civillian Jeep"). As time passed, Willy's Overland changed ownership and merged with other companies like Nash and became part of American Motors Corporation (AMC) in the 1960s.
By the 1970s the Jeep was looking long-in-the-tooth and the US military was looking for a beefier replacement. In order to meet contractual obligations AMC set up a new division called "AM General" (because they wanted an independant entity from Jeep that did not sell to civilians) to develop and build what we know as the Hummer. However, in 1978 controlling interest in AMC was sold to Renault which was at the time wholly owned by the French government (Renault was a "Regie Nationale"). As a result about a third of AM General was also owned by the French government. The military promtly "declassified" the Hummer but since there was no alternative readily available AMC was pushed to completely divest AM General to a "real American" ownership (or at least not foreign-government-owned). If AMC did not divest itself of AM General its deal with Renault would've been in jeopardy.
This very closely parallels what happened with Lenovo--its ownership chaged to include some ownership by a foreign government and the milliaty "declassified" it as a supplier as a result. What is different is that alternatives were readily available so rather than blocking IBM's deal or forcing Lenovo to change its ownership they did the easiest thing and bought Dells.
Does that mean his cellphone is a threat to national security!?
Bingo! There isn't a commercially available cellphone approved for classified use by the US military (or the Canadian military IIRC). Besides the fact that most are probably made in China it is probably altogether too easy to tap into conversations on such phones for the military's liking (even today's digital phones, but the old analogue ones were trivially easy to tap).
On a side note, I have an interesting anecdote. I was driving back home from the US across the border into Canada a few months after 9/11. As I approached I got a call so I was talking on the cellphone when the US customs agent/marshal approached my car and very abruptly told me to end the conversation and turn off my cellphone...because it was a security risk. I wasn't even finished saying bye when he said "turn it off NOW sir!"--it agitated him quite a
Sun is endorsing Ubuntu, a Linux-based operating system. There isn't anything indicating that they are favouring any particular software packaging system. Dpkg/apt-get might be the way Ubuntu keeps its own house in order but nothing prevents anyone from installing and maintaining RPM packages on a machine running Ubuntu.
;-)
Merits of dpkg aside, SUN may give standards compliance a high priority in its products, and like it or not in order to comply with ISO23360 the operating system MUST support the installation and management of RPMs (it need not be the native package system of the OS, but ALL ISO23360 compliant applicaitons are distributed as RPM packages). SUN could very likely contribute its resources towards making Ubuntu comply with ISO23360. Mark Shuttleworth himself stated that this was a goal for upcoming Ubuntu releases so they would be on the same page. Therefore if the ISO23360 standard gains traction it could mean that installing RPMs on Ubuntu machines could become more common than you'd think, especially for companies like my employer--large enterprises that salivate over anything with "ISO##### Compliant" on it...and guess what SUN's customer base is?
Oh yeah...perhaps I should explain what this ISO23360 is. Basically it is a standard that specifies a set of requirements for Linux-based OSes (file structures, included shared libraries, software packaging format, etc) to allow compliant application software to be easily deployed and executed on any compliant OS without the need to recompile and/or re-package for each OS as is the case today with Linux systems. It is more commonly known as LSB3.1
...to get a console
That $600 means I can play any of the coolest console games
Except there aren't any cool games for these new consoles. Only one of the consoles is even released, and I haven't seen any XBox360 titles that make me want to go out and get a 360. In fact, I've never seen an XBox title of any kind that made me want to go out and get an XBox. Halo? There is a PC version. Halo II or III? I'm not a huge FPS player and it seems more of the same to me. So far, despite the silly name, I think that the Nintendo Wii is the most innovative offering if not the most powerful.
The Xbox offers me roughly the same gaming experience for less money than a gaming PC
You can find a PC for the very same $600 that is quite capable of playing a lot of good games, plus it'll meet all your computing needs too. I think the console makers sense this because when asked to justify their high price, MS and Sony speak a lot about how their machines are so much more than mere game consoles and suggest implicitly that they could be replacements for video players, multimedia PCs and so on. Their software offerings, however, suggest they are not yet serious about anything beyond games just yet. They'd better pay attention to that though, or they might hit a 1983-like patch of trouble.
I don't have to upgrade the video card ever and the accessories are nice.
There are some pretty sweet PC accessories out there, and you most often aren't tied to your PC vendor like you are with console vendors. I haven't upgraded my video card in a few years and I haven't had a problem with the games I've bought. Windows Vista might require an upgrade but it's looking less and less like I'll ever get Vista anyways--My main home computer is Linux and I have an older secondary machine that came with XP already installed which is mostly used by my girlfriend (I may play the odd game).
I'm not sure if others have found the same thing, but it seems as I get older that my interest in new videogames has diminished drastically, but I still quite enjoy some older games, or simpler games in the style of older games. I couldn't care less about Halo III--don't think I'd play it if someone paid me to take a 360 and a copy of the game. However, I'll fire up MAME and play Centipede or Pepper II (was there ever a Pepper I?) or Mr. Do. I might play Quake to get out agression or play Sim City because it seems like a "constructive" waste of time. Maybe that is why none of these new consoles hasn't impressed me at all--they offer nothing to people with my tastes.
a) This is not true, as any basic check of median income would have told you ("median" being the key word, because it's not as skewed by rich folks as "average" income would be).
Median (or any other measure of "average" income) has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not a family lives paycheque to paycheque. The grandparent post is actually bang on, especially in North America but also in the rest of the 1st world too. This is for several reasons:
1) Wages in most 1st world countries have almost, BUT NOT QUITE, kept pace with inflation, so employed people are making more dollars but must spend even more dollars to make ends meet.
2) People are trying to "keep up to the Jones'" again at a pace not seen since Ronald Regan ran the US. Overall "average" families are buying larger homes, driving bigger vehicles, eating more food and so on.
3) Tax load is higher--in the US the gov't has to pay for all those military operations and has a crushing debt. Income taxes are relatively low but the US consumer is nickel-and-dimed to death by state and local taxes and service fees. Sales taxes are particularly bad because they are "regressive" so those who have to spend more of ther income to live effectively pay a higher tax rate (the poorer you are the higher your tax rate basically). Canadians are even more heavily taxed, although most of it comes right off your paycheque.
4) As a result of the above household debt is at a record high--on average US household debt load is ONE HUNDRED PERCENT of disposable income! Basically this means that if you add up the value of all the assets (house, cars, investments, etc) then subtract liabilities (mortgage, credit cards, loans, etc) that the average family is IN THE NEGATIVE by the same amount as their combined annual after-tax income!
The Atari VCS cost $249 when it was first launched. That's more than $800 in today's dollars. You were lucky to find a 19" TV set for $500 - about $1,500 in today's dollars.
Early adopters tended to be upper-middle class or even rich. $800 is still not that much today for them. What is different today is that the Atari was exciting, new and different from anything before--until 1978 basically all you could get was pong and Oddysey (hardwired to play one or a handful of very simple games). The "Fairchild Channel F" was the only cart-based console until the VCS and it was hard to find and had a small library of crappy games. Also The VCS situation was very different from the XBox360 or Wii or PS3. Back then going from pong to being able to play Space Invaders and Breakout (the hottest arcade games of the time) right in your home was amazing. What do we get now with these expensive new machines? Umm...well I guess I can play NFL football 2006 instead of NFL football 2005 and umm..you can see the players sweating and the picture will be clearer...if you buy a new HDTV. There isn't much there motivating average people to run out any buy these next-gen consoles yet. These new consoles are a bit like the Intellivision situation--when the Intellivision II came out it gathered dust on the store shelves because owners of the original Intellivision didn't see anything compelling about it (it looked prettier and talked if you had one of the handful of games that supported it--and the original intellivision could talk too if you got an add-on).
As for the TV, almost nobody had to buy a new one to take advantage of the VCS' capabilities--WAY more people owned 19" colour console sets in 1978 than currently own full-resolution HDTV sets today, and not many people will spend twice the money just to get a TV that makes their console look nice--and besides that crisper image there isn't much out there yet to get excited about.
I'm saying that most people do have the money, they just don't know how to prioritize their purchases.
Maybe they DO know how to prioritise--in fact maybe better than they did in the late 70's and early 80's. As you mentioned there is also
The closer spam looks like legitimate email traffic the harder it is to block them without also blocking some legitimate email.
/. a top-tier spammer was aggravated by their efforts and managed to get a list of addresses for those who signed onto bluesecurity. I just checked the "junk box" on my email server and have found that in the past 12 hours there have been about 50 emails entitled "bluesecurity.com" with a body containing the WHOIS record for their domain. Apparently, the spammers are already striking back with a vengeance.
Your argument makes sense but there is more to it than that. Spammers are starting to catch on that their techniques to thwart mail filters can be used to manipulate those filters to block other people's emails. THAT is still pretty inceniary. Let me explain what I mean:
Some time ago I signed onto the "bluesecurity" website as I was intereste in their counter-spam efforts. As we all know here on
Besides annoying the heck out of those unfortunate enough to be on the target list, the thought came to me that this could be a crude attempt to train email filters to block out any (legitimate) correspondence affiliated with bluesecurity.com. I think we're going to see a lot more of this in the future: Spammers for whatever reason select a victim (anti-spam organisations, Microsoft, Symantec, etc) and start sending out massive spams that either repeatedly mention the victim's name, website address domain, etc, or are crafted to look like legitimate correspondence from the victim. The scummy vermin that send out the spam are the same types that go on phishing expeditions so they've had practice imitating others.
Since so many people run email filters, once these filters intercept and mark those messages as spam then legitimate email from their victims are more likely to be blocked as spam. That's all I need is for a spammer to send a few dozen emails that look like Microsoft correspondence, only to have the email filter get trained to filter out REAL email from Microsoft about my MSDN subscription for example.
...from the start!
I hope 3.1 addresses my main gripe with RPMs: an RPM built for Fedora won't install into SUSE because of dependency issues, or vice versa.
Application distributors aren't supposed to build RPMs for Fedora or SuSE or Mandriva; they SHOULD be building RPMs for LSB. ALL RPMs built for LSB should have exactly ONE dependency: the LSB package. The old LSB troll on here from supposed Debian fans alternately makes me chuckle or want to smack then upside the head. Basically they say "but RPM sucks because of dependency hell and DEBs are way better because you can use apt-get--those idiots at the LSB should change the standard to use DEBs instead". HELLO DUMASSES, the whole idea of LSB is that there ARE no dependencies except the LSB standards! Why go through the bother of changing something as fundamental as the package/deployment format just because it is better at handling a problem that would be non-existant in a standards-comliant system!
What is exciting here is that LSB has not really been that "useful" because it was too narrow in scope. With LSB 3.x they have finally given serious attention to the DESKTOP by specifying base requirements for things like X, GTK and (optional at the moment) Qt libraries. Until now, if you wanted to distribute, say, a modern GTK-based GUI application as LSB the install package would have to link in all of that crap and it'd be HUGE. LSB-compliant packages were really only useful for console-based apps or server applications which severely limited the appeal of LSB. Now packaging and distribution LSB apps for both client and server, including rich GUI applications using modern toolkits, is reaching the point where it is actually practical to do so.
Most of the big OS distributors have been on board for awhile now (yes, including some Debian-based ones). Hopefully more big APPLICATION developers will clue in quickly to the fact that LSB is starting to hit its stride.
...tell ME they aren't going to do this too.
A pixel is a pixel is a pixel, not a 2 by 2 pixel block or anything else. Yes sometimes pixels are big and other times they are small. THAT'S THE WAY IT'S ALWAYS BEEN. Web developers that are complaining that their websites render too small because of high-definition screens are dumbasses for basing their whole layout on pixels to begin with. Pixel-based layouts bother me just as much as flash-heavy and/or over-animated websites. The fact that web developers insiste on relying on pixel based websites almost makes me reconsider my stance against capital punishment. Seriously.
If you want to use fixed layouts then use pt or em. THAT IS WHAT THEY ARE FOR! They are always supposed to be the same size--in particular pt is supposed to be 1/72 of an inch regardless of screen resolution, and user agents can allow viewersd to scale at will if they wish (view at over 100% perhaps, if you have difficulty seeing, or 50% to let people like you with a fetish for all things small see more at once). You can also use inches, centimetres or millimetres of you don't like using print media conventions. Problem solved--your website is now independent of screen resolution.
The ONLY time any web developer should EVER consider using px is if you need to align with a bitmap. Even then it is rarely needed because you can scale a bitmap to the above-mentioned units anyways. If bitmaps look ugly scaled then maybe the creators of user agents should put a bit more effort into doing a better job of scaling them, and improve (or add) support for vector images (the world would be a much better place if the craptacular IE had at least basic native support for SVG--Shame on ME, and kudos to the Mozilla team for stepping up in that department).
Their problems were that they wanted features they weren't finding in Linux, but did find in Windows.
WRONG. The problem was that they weren't aware that Linux-based systems acutally COULD do what they wanted and a Microsoft marketroid came along and showed them how it could be dome with Windows. Both examples of the reversion to Microsoft showed all the hallmarks of "you don't knw what you don't know"--not only did their IT people not know how to make Linux work for them--they weren't even fully aware of the capabilities of open source systems.
The articles mention one comany migrated to Linux 3 years ago, the other seven years ago. Did they really keep up with the fast-moving world of open source? In the anecdote about the company that stuck with Linux there was a fairly siginificant mention of upgrading both hardware and software, but in the other cases little to nothing was said about upgrading. It is entirely possible that the latter company was still runnning on their original Mandrake 6.x (or whatever it was in 1999) platform. Were they expecting their Linux systems to be magically immortal? If they implemented a Microsoft system in 1999, do you really think they'd be happy with NT4 and the big pile of manure that passed for Exchange Server at the time? I seriously think not.
I think the final solution of migrating (back) to another platform was too drastic, and that these companies dropped the ball when it came to examining the open source alternative. Three passwords to log into a VPN? Email boxes stored on clients? Lack of collaberation tools? COME ON! You can set up a Linux server to allow a Windows client to log in without any extra passwords. It isn't hard to set up a secure IMAP server using Postfix to manage mail server-side either, and there are "Exchange replacements" that may fit the bill if you need to do mare than just manage email centrally. There are a bazillion "portal frameworks" out there, and Subversion can be used as a collaberation tool for more than just computer code. I know this can all be done because I've done all of that myself. These people are lazy and uncreative and didn't even try to find a more elegant approach to solving their problems. Instead they let a Microsoft salesman sell them a sledgehammer to drive in their 10-penny nails.
These stories also underscore a problem with the Linux community as well, however. Microsoft made themselves readily available. They have an education programme that turns out MCSEs faster than rats can breed. The Windows brand is everywhere and they make it very clear with every release "what's new". Where were the Red Hat and Novell people when these Linux shops were struggling? Why isn't red-hat more agessively marketing and expanding RCHE certification? What about LPI? And as far as marketing goes, IBM has done a bit but Linux is far from front and centre, and the marketing presence of Red Hat and Novell is next to nothing in comparison to Microsoft's mega-campaigns that contain heavy dollops of information (or mis-information in some cases). Yes, MS is the big man on campus and has the resources to pull all this off the best, but it's going to take a huge marketing and support effort by the Linux community to make sure we not only convert more people to Linux but to retain them as well.
I want to know who has a job where they have so much extra time on their hands that they can debug the source code of their database product.
Nobody except the active contributers to the RDBMS I'm guessing. Certainly not be. But I'll tell you my personal experience with PostgreSQL and how it being open source directly benefited me:
I was doing a project involving PgSQL many years ago (v6.2 I think) to manage a small inventory database. There was a problem that looked like a bug in PgSQL rather than a configuration issue (I think it was causing VACUUM to fail among other things but my memory fails me). What I clearly remember was how I resolved the issue, and it is the first time that the benefits of open source directly affected me and when I becane clearly sold on open source.
I had given up and since there wasn't a company to turn to I looked for contact emails in what passed for the docs at the time (they are MUCH better now) and on the website. I emailed one of the core developers and described my problem. He emailed me back the next day and thanked me for my feedback and said he had a few other reports of problems somewhat similar to mine. He also ATTACHED THE SOURCE CODE OF THE PATCH he had been working on that was not yet in the release on the website! I applied the patch and recompiled and bingo...it was back to normal!
Now I was (still am) far from a guru C programmer but as with a lot of people I can stumble my way around makefiles and GCC and patches and so forth, and I did have time to recompile PgSQL. I can also (at the instruction of one of the developers) to traces and such and send in the results and THEY can do the debugging with my help. If I was using Microsoft SQL Server and had a similar problem I'd be screwed: I'd have to call clueless tech support, or wander around the KB articles and hope to find the solution, and in this case I'd probably find a useledd KB article along the lines of "Microsoft has acknowledged this to be an issue and will provide a solution in the next available hotfix" telling me to do some kludgy, unacceptable workaround in the meantime, which could be days, or weeks...or maybe even never. I certainly would NEVER have the ear of a Microsoft programmer who wrote or reviewed the code as a lowly intern-type doing a small experimental project.
So there you go...I'm (a) not an "elite programmer", (b) never been part of the PostgreSQL team beyond exchanging emails with a team member, and (c) though some may say I am a nerd I moved out of my parents' home when I was 17 and never lived in their basement. Despite that I have indeed directly benefited from source code availability for software that I did not write.
My D-Link DSL604t is Linux based too, and so is my PDA
/. audience--mostly younger males in IT. These folks think embedded means what controls their DVD player, television set, TiVo, PDA, router, etc.
These comments speak volumes about the bulk of the
While those are certainly a major portion of the embedded market, a large part of the embedded market (perhaps even larger than the consumer electronics segment) is outside the realm of consumer electronics. Think industrial automation, automotive control systems, logistics (barcode, RFid, etc).
Take the industrial automation market--GE, Siemens and Rockwell(Allen Bradley) are the GM, DaimlerChrysler and Ford of that market (the big three). Look at their lines of PLCs(Programmble Logic Controllers). How many of their PLC processors run Linux? EXACTLY ZERO. You have to understand the history of this market. Although PLCs are basically specialised computers, the design philosophy is based on a very different set of priorities. Things are kept simpler, more robust and hard real-time is usually essential. Customers demand 25 years or more for support and spare parts availability (the 7-year lifespan of Windows products is laughable in comparison). Change is slow and evolutionary.
Linux is capble of the task (there are a handful of smaller players offering RTLinux-based PLCs) but automation people are reluctat to change what works and suspicious of unconventional design choices. Just look at the most common way of programming PLCs--ladder logic. Yes, to this day typical PLC programmers are most comfortable using a graphical language that mimics engineering drawigs of electromehanical relay circuits commonly used before ENIAC blew its first valve, with little symbols for contactors and switches and coils.
This industry is also notoriously proprietary. Every vendor has invented its own, closed-design protocol stack and one were compatible with each other (like home computers of the 1980s). It took about a decade longer than the PC industry to wake up and participate in more open standards like Devicenet, Controlnet, FOUNDATION FieldBus etc
Contrast this to the history of Linux: it was wide open from the start, has evolved and advanced very rapidly, and certain aspects of it change often over time. This doesn't always give Linux a technical disadvantage, but it does mean it is a harder sell to the control systems crowd.
I'm sure that PLCs don't sell nearly as fast as iPods or cellphones ut they sell for a lot more money per unit, and they sell for a much longer period of time, but I'm willing to bet that is a big reason Linux remains a minor player in the embedded space. I think it is gradually changing though--for example companies partnered with Rockwell are producing Linux-based modules that fit in Allen Bradley PLC chassis for data collection and so on, and with the emergence of commodity IT technology on the factory floor (in the form of Windows-based operator interfaces, MSSQL and Oracle databases to collect process data, etc) engineers have been forced to face the instability and "paradigm shift" anyways. I think that the market is reaching a point of being more comfortable with looking at more "radical" alternatives like Linux.
Encountered someone who wasn't "normal"?
I've never been diagnosed with any sort of disorder but from time to time I apparently exhibit "eccentric" behaviour. It isn't so much now but when I was younger. Among other things, it sometimes looks like I have ADD and it'll seem like I've zoned out or something has distracted me. Sometimes that is the case but very often I'm still listening or actually interested in what that person is saying. It drives regualr people up the wall so it'd probably hopelessly confuse an autistic person with this new device.
Anyways I'm not sure if some egghead has invented a syndrome to describe my quirks, but I think that every single person is just a bit off in some way and to varying degrees will react unconventionally. Heck...the problem is even simpler than that. What if the autistic person encounters a blind person, or someone with a facial palsy who is physically incapable of "looking interested"? I think it'll be a long time before there is a device sophisticated enough to interpret people's reactions with consistency (that'll only happen when we've figured out how to create a truly telepathic device rather than one that works on physichal cues).
With age I've become more perceptive of how people react to me and it probably helped make me more "well adjusted". I do notice, however, that I have a harder time among people who are physically and/or emotionally less mature (teenagers especially but generally under 25 years old). It's hard to describe but I'll more often get a look like I've just told a joke and they don't get it, or like the dog looking into the old RCA Victrola. In different (older) company I get vastly different reaction. How would an autistic person handle this? I thought that a person with autism tended to think like cats think--they learn that this action produces that reaction (or am I wrong there?). So, wouldn't it quite frustrate such a person if they behaved a certain way around, say, a teenaged girl and the device buzzed while the same thing wouldn't set off the device with a 50 year old man?
I guess you could file me under "doubting Thomas"
Windows 95 was the start of the tree..
The start of the tree was well before that...try DOS 1.0. Each subsequent major version of DOS would be a branch of that tree (2.x, 3.4, 4.x, 5.x, 6.x). Windows 9x and Me versions were just more branches that just happened to integrate a GUI and 32-bit extensions to DOS:
Windows 95 == DOS 7.0
Windows 95A/B/C == DOS 7.1
Windows 98/98SE == DOS 7.11
Windows Me == DOS 8.0
Of course Vista will suck, they are messing with the kernel.
Whether Vista will suck is a point of debate. However, from what I've seen MS is not "messing with" the NT kernel in any meaningful way. They are, however, messing with the driver model...but in a good way (moving video and print-engine driver stuff out of kernel space). This may affect compatibility or stability with older hardware and kernel-space drivers (which I heard were supposed to still work in a pinch but won't be supported by MS) but architecturally it is a Good Thing (R) (TM).
As much as most of us wish for Linux, OSX or something else to replace windows, its not happening on the desktop.
[...]
Lets face it, Linux is missing some key software areas like Tax Preperation software (finance in general), games, Itunes compatible players (even if its illegal in US), etc.
More like "it hasn't happened yet". The Linux desktop (in both the GNOME and KDE camps but GNOME in particular) has hit its stride and has really been moving forward in the last couple of years. I moved my main desktop at home to 100% linux and haven't had the need to use Windows for anything at all since then--it already meets all my personal needs. I have to do my taxes for the first time since making the move, but I may not need to relent and use a Windows PC even now--I'm going to examine some web-based alternatives that have appeared in the last couple of years (this is in Canada--not sure what options exist for taxpayers in the US or other nations).
It really depends on your needs. Not everybody desperately needs iTunes, and a lot of people are content to entertain themselves with the occasional game of AisleRiot or Frozen Bubble or whatever. There are a lot of casual computer users out there that would be well-served by Linux, and if distribution vendors play their cards right they could establish the Linux platform in that market and finally draw the appropriate level of attention of application developers. It's a challenge but it isn't impossible, and the longer MS stumbles around the bigger the opportunity for Linux (and Apple and whoever).
t's easy to ignore that "fact" since it isn't true at all.
...sorry I got nothin'...
Windows 2000 (1999)
Windows XP (2001)
Windows Server 2003 (2003)
[blah blah]
(well, Windows 2000 was actually released about 7 years ago..not five...but whatever)
Welcome to the Microsoft Ice Cream Parlour! We've introduced tons of new exciting flavours of ice cream in the past five years:
* Vanilla
* French Vanilla
* Vanilla topped with fudge
* Vanilla with sprinkles
* Vanilla with fudge and sprinkles
* Vanilla with a cherry on top
I'm sorry, but I really haven't seen any meaningful innovation from Microsoft at all in the 21st century...especially when compared to the progress Apple and the open source community have eachm ade in the same amount of time. Linux has not only caught up in "copying" its closed competitors, it is now entering a point where it is leading the pack in some respects (it is in a position to beat MS to release of a 3D accelerated desktop, it is substantially ahead of Microsoft in high-performance computing/clustering, etc).
Microsoft's slowness-to-innovate isn't just limited to the operationg system either. Let's examine their database offerings in the 21st century shall we?
* SQL Server 2000
* umm....3 service packs?
* SQL Server 2005
Now lets look at PostgreSQL's milestone releases in the same time frame:
* v6.5
* v7.0
* v7.1
* v7.2
* v7.3
* v7.4
* v8.0
* v8.1
And with each of those major releases there were 3 to 10+ minor releases to improve the products stability and performance. MySQL has undergone similarly rapid development and improvement and has gone from 3.x to 5.0.
How much longer can Microsloth rely on its monopoly status to compensate for its relatively glacial pace of innovation? I think it's really difficult to guess, but I think there is a tipping point where MS could quite abruptly move from a point of stable stagnation/slow growth to a situation of rapid decline. This could happen as soon as next year or (probably more likely) with the next major release of Windows or Office after Vista or Office 2007. I can envision people being tired of the sliding schedules and seeing less justification to upgrade than ever before leading to a disastrously disappointing major product release leading to this rapid decline.
Of course, MS could pull its butt out of the fire just in time. It wouldn't be the first time MS has had to wake up and do a major refocus after all...