But still, MS *could have* designed a widget (or control or whatever) with a standardized API in such a way that another API compatable control (e.g., gecko) could have been easily substituted by simply replacing a dll, or even adding a new, differently named dll. They could have, for example, had the main HTML control be simply a wrapper that looks in the registry to find out which actual API-compatable dll to call to implement the control via their component embedding mechanism (COM? I don't know windows terminology that well). I would think this could have been done in a way that could be transparent to the app and hence binary compatible.
Again, the point is things could have been modularized by design and still be easy and transparent for app vendors, but for seemingly obvious reasons, the decision was made not to do this.
Of course just deleting IE from win98 both is possible and will break some applications. But that's not really the point. Microsoft has integrated IE into the core functionailty of Windows and of course many app vendors have come to depend on that.
The point is that tightly integrating IE into the core functionality of Windows was a design decision rather than some inevitable law of nature as MS wants us to believe. If they wanted, they could have set things up so that browsers and HTML handlers other than MS's could be easily plugged in and integrated in place of the equivalent IE-based components in a way that would have been transparent to third party software, but they made a design decision not to do this.
The correct Linux example would not be glibc but, say, replacing Mozilla with Netscape or Konqueror. With modern desktops like GNOME (and I assume KDE too, although I don't use it much) things are set up so you can easily do this in such a way that any compliant application that needs an HTML URL handler will transparently use the one you specify.
Although it's not open source, another program to check out is Intellisys Project Desktop. It is Java-based, so it is cross-platform, which can be useful in some environments. It is also more mature than MrProject or Toutdoux (sp?).
I live in a predominantly rural area, and we have a community network that does a pretty good job of providing an internet-based tie for the community. The network is run by a non-profit organization and is funded primarily by selling internet access and web hosting to local individuals and businesses.
Among the community services that are funded by this are providing free internet access in libraries, schools and senior centers, which would otherwise not be available in typical rural communities, providing free web space for other local non-profit organizations, providing local real-time election results, refurbishing donated PCs for use by other non-profits, and providing links to local businesses.
Our community network has been very successful. Because of being non-profit, they can offer competitive internet access rates and high quality local service. They have attracted many local users who have migrated over from larger ISPs such as Earthlink as their rates have gone up and their service has gone down. Selling low cost internet access as a non-profit and providing good service seems to be a good way to fund a community network, at least it has worked for us.
While there are certainly many cases where a proprietary closed-source piece of software may be necessary, there are also big steps that can be still be taken.
In many cases, the very expensive, specialized pieces of software are more likely to be properly licensed anyway, since they usually use a more complex and restrictive licensing means which ties the license to your hardware in some form or another.
But on the less specialized side, just eliminating MS Office and using, say, OpenOffice6, would probably eliminate nearly half of the headaches with the BSA, as well as saving perhaps hundreds of thousands of dollars in a large campus. Eliminating Windows itself where possible (agreed, it's not always possible) would elimnate another huge chunk of the problem. The reason is because these pieces of software are both very common and very easily pirated, since they don't employ complex license managers.
Yes, there will still be the need for specialized commercial packages, but the problem and cost could probably be reduced many times by replacing the simpler stuff that tends to get pirated the most with free/open solutions.
That you *really did* buy the software, and you *really did* lose the original CD and license paperwork (presumably an authentic CD would be accepted as having purchased the product, even if the license paperwork were missing). Assuming you are bound by contract to submit to the audit itself (wich other posters have rightly questioned), what are your choices?
1. Fight them in court, in which case you might actually win -- the judge might agree that you are innocent until proven guilty.
2. Pay again for the software.
In most cases, which is cheaper for you in the long run? I think this is the problem, and what the BSA is depending on most of the time -- the simple fact that in many cases it probably costs less to pay for the missing licenses than to fight for your rights, even if the software was completely legal.
The same point applies. Let's take another example: Why do Kodak and Fuji continue to make film even though the camera market is split between a half dozen or a dozen major camera manufacturers? Because there is profit in it and the *interface* (e.g., image size, sprocket hole placement, developing process, etc.) is standardized, NOT THE CAMERA ITSELF. Film is not a simple product (and nither are cameras, for that matter). Clearly, developing a good film takes far more than one engineer and tester, it takes years of work by many high-paid chemists, materials engineers, and others. Yet the interface is standard, and the same film works in all of the manufacturer's cameras.
The basic idea here is that you don't have to have one-and-only-one OS in the world to achieve standardized interfaces (APIs, file formats, and other interfaces) that make writing portable code practical. Microsoft (and apparently AMD) would like you to believe so, but it doesn't have to be the case. There are examples where it works, even if they are not mainstream because of Microsoft's dominance.
As to who should determine the standards, I have no problem with using the IEEE or any other appropriate body as long as they represent all of the players as equally and fairly as possible. I have been to IEEE standards meetings - they are long, tedious, and boring, and the process takes a long time, but it usually works out. Not always without some corporate political influence, but still better than a non-competitive one-company-takes-all approach.
I never advocated breaking up MS in my original post, but the PC industry will not decline if MS is forced (like all other monopolists) to avoid using their OS monopoly to gain monopolies in other areas by bundling. ATT wanted you to believe the same bunk decades ago when they were broken up, and it didn't happen. Remember back when Kodak was forced to un-bundle processing with their film? They weren't broken up, they were just forced to follow the law. Same idea here. What would happen is that interfaces would standardize in an open way so that, for example, all media players could play the same standardized media files and, oh my gosh!, users would get a bigger choice of media players. What a novel idea, more choice instead of less.
Yes, I do know what an API is. Sorry, should have been more precise, but I was trying to make a different point, and the difference between an API, a file standard, a standard communication protocol, etc., didn't really matter to the point. The important point is that they are all standardized interfaces of some sort, and that you don't have to have one-and-only-one OS in the whole world in order to have standardized interfaces that make writing portable code practical.
Why does Fram make oil filters for cars even though the car market is split between a dozen or so major manufacturers? Why does Champion make spark plugs even thought the automobile market is split between a dozen or so major manufacturers? Etc., etc.? Because the profits are still there in the products, and the *APIs* (thread sizes and interfaces in this case) are standerdized (at least to some degree).
What I think Sanders and others don't realize, is that if the OS market share had been evenly split between several major players, then what would have become standardized would have been the APIs and interfaces rather than the OS platform itself. The market would have demanded it, and the standards would have been determined by the needs of all companies involved rather than by decree of one monopoly company.
Even with today's situation, there are several examples of such API standards, such as TCP/IP, OpenGL, HTML, XML, etc. Unfortunately, because of the current monopoly situation, there are several standards which are proprietary and not open, primarily in the area of file formats such as MS Office formats. And there is proprietary pressure on the current existing open standards (e.g., embrace and extend).
Sure, standardizing the entire OS instead of the APIs and interfaces achieves the same goal in the short term, and perhaps this goal does benefit consumers and some software vendors, but it does so by eliminating competetion in the OS and API market, which will have the effects of monopoly rents (already happening) and eventually reduced quality (may take a little longer, but it will happen).
Kodak saying no one else can make a set of chemicals that develop their film if they plan to give them away for free? Is there really legal ground for them to uphold this, especially having already been judged a monopoly in federal appeals court?
it is very true that when you cheat the only person you're really hurting is yourself.
This is the common wisdom, and while it's true that someone who cheats their way through college may ultilmately be hurting themselves, there could be a negative impact on the college as well. Colleges and universities care a lot about their reputation and credibility, and if they pump out enough people who look much better on paper than they really are, it will ultimately have a negative impact on their reputations.
I'm not justifying this particular service, it does seem too extreme, but rather just saying that colleges do have a stake in not turning out too many graduates who have cheated their way through to a large degree.
The article points out that it should be OK for the free software community to implement MS API's like SMB (SAMBA) and Windows itself (Wine) because they are already established standards, but it should not be alright to implement.NET because it is only an emerging standard not yet heavily adopted by many.
I disagree with this conclusion. Why wait. If you wait until.NET is popular and widespread before starting a compatable project, then it will already be too late and you will be eternally playing catch-up. Think how much more accepted Linux might have been if it was also able run Windows applications well from the get-go.
Here are the two possibilities:
1 -.NET becomes very popular and widely deployed as Microsoft wishes it to be. In this case Linux and other OSS will benefit from already having a.NET implementation (Mono) in place. No need to spend two or three years to play catch-up while OSS loses market share to MS.
2. -.NET is a bust and never becomes popular or widely deployed. Microsoft loses big time (since they are hanging their future on it), and OSS (mainly just Ximian) loses a gamble by having wasted some development resources. Big deal. And mainly just Ximian would have lost anything, the rest of the OSS community will have lost very little.
These two alternatives seem better than the third possibility, which is that.NET and C# become widely deployed and OSS operating systems are caught with their pants down, not being able to host any.NET related services or applications.
They certainly don't comprise the majority of UNIX installations, but there are many cases where UNIX is used on the desktop to run "workstation" desktop apps. Examples include many engineering environments (particularly IC design, which is where I work), 3D animation for movies, many scientific and research environments, some high-end CAD environments, etc.
Linux is finally starting to move into some of these areas as older UNIX workstation hardware becomes obsolete and in need of replacement. In IC design, for example, many industry leading front-end tools are now available for Linux. Some of these areas, like 3D movie effects, have generated a fair amount of press recently.
Linux may never rule the traditional PC desktop, but it will gain a foothold in the handful of desktop environments currently occupied by legacy UNIX.
The raising of the noise floor for narrowband users (and other UWB users for that matter) is a concern, but I think the effect has been overestimated a bit. It is true that many UWB transmitters in a close area will measurably degrade the noise floor for other radios operating in that local area, but the RF energy falls off as at least 1/r^2, and in UWB it is very small to begin with (the UWB emissions actually meet part 15 specs for unintentional emissions).
Once you are very far at all from a group of UWB transmitters, their ourtput will not affect the noise floor beyond what would otherwise be the current noise floor to any measurable amount. In this sense, it's not quite as bad as the trash analogy. If UWB is used for short range indoor comm applications (e.g., in-home video distribution and networking), any increase in the noise floor caused by the equipment in one house would be nonexistent four or five housed down the street.
In other words, for short range UWB applications, the local noise floor will only be affected by those UWB transmitters within a certain relatively short distance, not by all the UWB transmitters in the country.
I have had some exposure to companies working on UWB. There are currently two primary markets being targeted by UWB: position and tracking (including through-wall radars used by the military and law enforcement), and communications.
So far, the primary focus seems to have been on the position and tracking side. Primarily, this is because with out FCC approval, the only markets that could be targeted for an actual product are markets where it is possible to get a waiver - military and law enforcement are two such areas.
The current crop of chips that these systems are built on are very expensive and power-hungry. Because of the sub-nanosecond nature of the pulses, fairly exotic and relatively expensive technologies are required to both generate the pulses (which must not only be fast, but also properly shaped so they don't contain too much energy in certain areas of the spectrum), and to receive them.
In terms of communication capabilities, the current technology is not anywhere near the information bandwidth vs. range quoted in the article
Next generation chipsets will both increase performance and reduce power and cost, but these chips are still in the early planning stages. I wouldn't expect too many cheap, mainstream products in 18 months - it will probably take longer than that.
The technology clearly differentiates itself in the position and tracking area, with accuracies that are difficult or impossible to achieve with narrowband technolgies. The communications market, however, is extremely cost sensitive, and the road is littered with cases where the best technology didn't necessarily win, for a large number of reasons.
The companies championing UWB, such as Time Domain, are working hard to make both the technoloy and FCC approval a reality, and over time UWB will probably find significant markets, although it may not completely change the face of the earth overnight.
I don't have a link handy, but a while ago I read a very interesting essay where the author made the observation that the government doesn't have to legislate or force standards in order to affect a change. The government is such a large purchaser of computers and software that they could simply use their huge purchasing power to influence the market in the direction of open standards if they wanted to. If the government refused to buy into proprietary standards, many companies would support open standards rather than loose a customer that size.
No customers contacted by CNET News.com said they planned to evaluate alternative applications
There's your answer on the price issue. Companies obviously feel the cost of changing (retraining, losing interoperability with others, etc) is still greater than the cost of paying Microsoft's monopoly prices (soon to be rents). I wonder just how expensive an OS or Office upgrade must get for them to consider a change as being cost effective? Microsoft will raise prices until they find this point (can't really blame them), and apparently they still have some wiggle room, even as high as their prices have become! Only a very small percentage have gotten pissed off enough to change.
The amazing thing is that companies have switched software before (Visicalc -> 123 -> Excel, Harvard Graphics -> Freelance -> Powerpoint, WordStar -> WordPerfect -> Word, etc.) but this time they seem as stubborn as an ox and much more unwilling to change, perhaps because the number of users to retrain is so much higher than in the "old days".
The problem is that Apple never lowered prices even back when they had much larger than 5% market share. They seem to have long ago decided on a pricing structure that has settled them into a 5% market of loyal users, and they must figure this maximizes profits for them. Increasing market share by lowering prices doesn't seem to be (and never has been) an attractive strategy for Apple, and, as you mention, the more they let their market share slide, the harder it is to do.
They may have been on the right track with the i-Mac, but they didn't keep up the push by upgrading rapidly and continuing to reduce prices, and that one too has languished. It's really a shame--at one point i-Macs were flying off the shelves nearly as fast as Wintel hardware. I had a lot of hope for Apple at that moment.
As someone else mentioned, G4/G5 PPC machines may be a bit better than Intel PCs, but will most people perceive them as being worth nearly _twice_ as much? Whenever I've been in the market for a new PC, I've always checked out the current crop of Mac hardware. Each time, I have liked what I've seen, but simply could not justify paying almost twice as much for similar or at most slightly better performance.
The acceptance of XP will be slow because it is relatively expensive compared to the added advantages that most users will get. Remember, right now most home users use their PCs to send email and surf the web at 56K. Even serious multimedia users are a small percentage compared to the email/web crowd at this point in time
I will agree that with XP, MS has finally produced a consumer OS that at least comes close to being worthy of the hardware it runs on, even though it attempts to bring with it multimedia format lock-in. With the retail price so high, however, and the fact that MS has made it more difficult to install one copy on multiple PCs, I suspect that only a small percentage of existing PC owners will bother to upgrade off the retail shelf, and even if they do, they may not upgrade all of their machines.
Even medium sized businesses (that don't get huge site licensing deals) will hesitate because of the cost. Our company has already decided to stick with '98 for the time being.
That leaves much of the uptake of XP to new hardware, which will of course come with XP at greatly reduced OEM prices. It will eventually gain dominace though this, and the fact that broadband and multimedia will eventually grow, but the PC market in the US is beginning to saturate as many families now have PCs capable of email and web surfing, and the growth will be slow.
1. Treat your email address with the same respect you would give your phone number - only give it out when necessary.
2. Send "remove" replies to spam. It only takes a few seconds and it actually works enough of the time to be worth the few seconds.
3. Check your email only a couple times a day, and let people know that's what you do when you give them your email. Of course, there will be times when something urgent is happening and you will have to break this rule, but most people won't know when that's happening and won't depend on it.
4. For urgent items, have important people use other means to contact you that don't keep you tied to a computer, such as phone, cell phone, pager, ham radio, smoke signals, etc. Less important people can wait for their replies. When I was in college 25 years ago, we had neither email nor cell phones, but somehow urgent things got taken care of.
I'm honestly not sure if the metadata and journal will be fully compatable with Partition Magic.
I'm not sure either. My plan is to try it on a fresh install once I upgrade to RH7.2 and see if it works. If it corrupts everything, no biggie since it was a fresh install.
It may also be that PM might refuse to recognize it if the partition type ID is different for ext3 (which I assume it is, although I don't know for sure).
The nice thing about ext3 in either of these cases is that you can back-convert to ext2, resize the partition, and re-convert to ext3.
BTW, I agree with your comments on alternative partitioning tools; but I have been a PM user for many years and have come to trust it, so I haven't felt like changing even though good GPL'd tools are now available.
Slashdot Mirror
But still, MS *could have* designed a widget (or control or whatever) with a standardized API in such a way that another API compatable control (e.g., gecko) could have been easily substituted by simply replacing a dll, or even adding a new, differently named dll. They could have, for example, had the main HTML control be simply a wrapper that looks in the registry to find out which actual API-compatable dll to call to implement the control via their component embedding mechanism (COM? I don't know windows terminology that well). I would think this could have been done in a way that could be transparent to the app and hence binary compatible.
Again, the point is things could have been modularized by design and still be easy and transparent for app vendors, but for seemingly obvious reasons, the decision was made not to do this.
Of course just deleting IE from win98 both is possible and will break some applications. But that's not really the point. Microsoft has integrated IE into the core functionailty of Windows and of course many app vendors have come to depend on that.
The point is that tightly integrating IE into the core functionality of Windows was a design decision rather than some inevitable law of nature as MS wants us to believe. If they wanted, they could have set things up so that browsers and HTML handlers other than MS's could be easily plugged in and integrated in place of the equivalent IE-based components in a way that would have been transparent to third party software, but they made a design decision not to do this.
The correct Linux example would not be glibc but, say, replacing Mozilla with Netscape or Konqueror. With modern desktops like GNOME (and I assume KDE too, although I don't use it much) things are set up so you can easily do this in such a way that any compliant application that needs an HTML URL handler will transparently use the one you specify.
Although it's not open source, another program to check out is Intellisys Project Desktop. It is Java-based, so it is cross-platform, which can be useful in some environments. It is also more mature than MrProject or Toutdoux (sp?).
Might just be coincidence with the compiler/binary compatability thing, but it seems that major RH releases also track kernel versions:
RH 5.x - kernel 2.0.x
RH 6.x - kernel 2.2.x
RH 7.x - kernel 2.4.x
I live in a predominantly rural area, and we have a community network that does a pretty good job of providing an internet-based tie for the community. The network is run by a non-profit organization and is funded primarily by selling internet access and web hosting to local individuals and businesses.
Among the community services that are funded by this are providing free internet access in libraries, schools and senior centers, which would otherwise not be available in typical rural communities, providing free web space for other local non-profit organizations, providing local real-time election results, refurbishing donated PCs for use by other non-profits, and providing links to local businesses.
Our community network has been very successful. Because of being non-profit, they can offer competitive internet access rates and high quality local service. They have attracted many local users who have migrated over from larger ISPs such as Earthlink as their rates have gone up and their service has gone down. Selling low cost internet access as a non-profit and providing good service seems to be a good way to fund a community network, at least it has worked for us.
While there are certainly many cases where a proprietary closed-source piece of software may be necessary, there are also big steps that can be still be taken.
In many cases, the very expensive, specialized pieces of software are more likely to be properly licensed anyway, since they usually use a more complex and restrictive licensing means which ties the license to your hardware in some form or another.
But on the less specialized side, just eliminating MS Office and using, say, OpenOffice6, would probably eliminate nearly half of the headaches with the BSA, as well as saving perhaps hundreds of thousands of dollars in a large campus. Eliminating Windows itself where possible (agreed, it's not always possible) would elimnate another huge chunk of the problem. The reason is because these pieces of software are both very common and very easily pirated, since they don't employ complex license managers.
Yes, there will still be the need for specialized commercial packages, but the problem and cost could probably be reduced many times by replacing the simpler stuff that tends to get pirated the most with free/open solutions.
That you *really did* buy the software, and you *really did* lose the original CD and license paperwork (presumably an authentic CD would be accepted as having purchased the product, even if the license paperwork were missing). Assuming you are bound by contract to submit to the audit itself (wich other posters have rightly questioned), what are your choices?
1. Fight them in court, in which case you might actually win -- the judge might agree that you are innocent until proven guilty.
2. Pay again for the software.
In most cases, which is cheaper for you in the long run? I think this is the problem, and what the BSA is depending on most of the time -- the simple fact that in many cases it probably costs less to pay for the missing licenses than to fight for your rights, even if the software was completely legal.
The same point applies. Let's take another example: Why do Kodak and Fuji continue to make film even though the camera market is split between a half dozen or a dozen major camera manufacturers? Because there is profit in it and the *interface* (e.g., image size, sprocket hole placement, developing process, etc.) is standardized, NOT THE CAMERA ITSELF. Film is not a simple product (and nither are cameras, for that matter). Clearly, developing a good film takes far more than one engineer and tester, it takes years of work by many high-paid chemists, materials engineers, and others. Yet the interface is standard, and the same film works in all of the manufacturer's cameras.
The basic idea here is that you don't have to have one-and-only-one OS in the world to achieve standardized interfaces (APIs, file formats, and other interfaces) that make writing portable code practical. Microsoft (and apparently AMD) would like you to believe so, but it doesn't have to be the case. There are examples where it works, even if they are not mainstream because of Microsoft's dominance.
As to who should determine the standards, I have no problem with using the IEEE or any other appropriate body as long as they represent all of the players as equally and fairly as possible. I have been to IEEE standards meetings - they are long, tedious, and boring, and the process takes a long time, but it usually works out. Not always without some corporate political influence, but still better than a non-competitive one-company-takes-all approach.
I never advocated breaking up MS in my original post, but the PC industry will not decline if MS is forced (like all other monopolists) to avoid using their OS monopoly to gain monopolies in other areas by bundling. ATT wanted you to believe the same bunk decades ago when they were broken up, and it didn't happen. Remember back when Kodak was forced to un-bundle processing with their film? They weren't broken up, they were just forced to follow the law. Same idea here. What would happen is that interfaces would standardize in an open way so that, for example, all media players could play the same standardized media files and, oh my gosh!, users would get a bigger choice of media players. What a novel idea, more choice instead of less.
Yes, I do know what an API is. Sorry, should have been more precise, but I was trying to make a different point, and the difference between an API, a file standard, a standard communication protocol, etc., didn't really matter to the point. The important point is that they are all standardized interfaces of some sort, and that you don't have to have one-and-only-one OS in the whole world in order to have standardized interfaces that make writing portable code practical.
Why does Fram make oil filters for cars even though the car market is split between a dozen or so major manufacturers? Why does Champion make spark plugs even thought the automobile market is split between a dozen or so major manufacturers? Etc., etc.? Because the profits are still there in the products, and the *APIs* (thread sizes and interfaces in this case) are standerdized (at least to some degree).
What I think Sanders and others don't realize, is that if the OS market share had been evenly split between several major players, then what would have become standardized would have been the APIs and interfaces rather than the OS platform itself. The market would have demanded it, and the standards would have been determined by the needs of all companies involved rather than by decree of one monopoly company.
Even with today's situation, there are several examples of such API standards, such as TCP/IP, OpenGL, HTML, XML, etc. Unfortunately, because of the current monopoly situation, there are several standards which are proprietary and not open, primarily in the area of file formats such as MS Office formats. And there is proprietary pressure on the current existing open standards (e.g., embrace and extend).
Sure, standardizing the entire OS instead of the APIs and interfaces achieves the same goal in the short term, and perhaps this goal does benefit consumers and some software vendors, but it does so by eliminating competetion in the OS and API market, which will have the effects of monopoly rents (already happening) and eventually reduced quality (may take a little longer, but it will happen).
Kodak saying no one else can make a set of chemicals that develop their film if they plan to give them away for free? Is there really legal ground for them to uphold this, especially having already been judged a monopoly in federal appeals court?
it is very true that when you cheat the only person you're really hurting is yourself.
This is the common wisdom, and while it's true that someone who cheats their way through college may ultilmately be hurting themselves, there could be a negative impact on the college as well. Colleges and universities care a lot about their reputation and credibility, and if they pump out enough people who look much better on paper than they really are, it will ultimately have a negative impact on their reputations.
I'm not justifying this particular service, it does seem too extreme, but rather just saying that colleges do have a stake in not turning out too many graduates who have cheated their way through to a large degree.
The article points out that it should be OK for the free software community to implement MS API's like SMB (SAMBA) and Windows itself (Wine) because they are already established standards, but it should not be alright to implement .NET because it is only an emerging standard not yet heavily adopted by many.
.NET is popular and widespread before starting a compatable project, then it will already be too late and you will be eternally playing catch-up. Think how much more accepted Linux might have been if it was also able run Windows applications well from the get-go.
.NET becomes very popular and widely deployed as Microsoft wishes it to be. In this case Linux and other OSS will benefit from already having a .NET implementation (Mono) in place. No need to spend two or three years to play catch-up while OSS loses market share to MS.
.NET is a bust and never becomes popular or widely deployed. Microsoft loses big time (since they are hanging their future on it), and OSS (mainly just Ximian) loses a gamble by having wasted some development resources. Big deal. And mainly just Ximian would have lost anything, the rest of the OSS community will have lost very little.
.NET and C# become widely deployed and OSS operating systems are caught with their pants down, not being able to host any .NET related services or applications.
I disagree with this conclusion. Why wait. If you wait until
Here are the two possibilities:
1 -
2. -
These two alternatives seem better than the third possibility, which is that
They certainly don't comprise the majority of UNIX installations, but there are many cases where UNIX is used on the desktop to run "workstation" desktop apps. Examples include many engineering environments (particularly IC design, which is where I work), 3D animation for movies, many scientific and research environments, some high-end CAD environments, etc.
Linux is finally starting to move into some of these areas as older UNIX workstation hardware becomes obsolete and in need of replacement. In IC design, for example, many industry leading front-end tools are now available for Linux. Some of these areas, like 3D movie effects, have generated a fair amount of press recently.
Linux may never rule the traditional PC desktop, but it will gain a foothold in the handful of desktop environments currently occupied by legacy UNIX.
The raising of the noise floor for narrowband users (and other UWB users for that matter) is a concern, but I think the effect has been overestimated a bit. It is true that many UWB transmitters in a close area will measurably degrade the noise floor for other radios operating in that local area, but the RF energy falls off as at least 1/r^2, and in UWB it is very small to begin with (the UWB emissions actually meet part 15 specs for unintentional emissions).
Once you are very far at all from a group of UWB transmitters, their ourtput will not affect the noise floor beyond what would otherwise be the current noise floor to any measurable amount. In this sense, it's not quite as bad as the trash analogy. If UWB is used for short range indoor comm applications (e.g., in-home video distribution and networking), any increase in the noise floor caused by the equipment in one house would be nonexistent four or five housed down the street.
In other words, for short range UWB applications, the local noise floor will only be affected by those UWB transmitters within a certain relatively short distance, not by all the UWB transmitters in the country.
I have had some exposure to companies working on UWB. There are currently two primary markets being targeted by UWB: position and tracking (including through-wall radars used by the military and law enforcement), and communications.
So far, the primary focus seems to have been on the position and tracking side. Primarily, this is because with out FCC approval, the only markets that could be targeted for an actual product are markets where it is possible to get a waiver - military and law enforcement are two such areas.
The current crop of chips that these systems are built on are very expensive and power-hungry. Because of the sub-nanosecond nature of the pulses, fairly exotic and relatively expensive technologies are required to both generate the pulses (which must not only be fast, but also properly shaped so they don't contain too much energy in certain areas of the spectrum), and to receive them.
In terms of communication capabilities, the current technology is not anywhere near the information bandwidth vs. range quoted in the article
Next generation chipsets will both increase performance and reduce power and cost, but these chips are still in the early planning stages. I wouldn't expect too many cheap, mainstream products in 18 months - it will probably take longer than that.
The technology clearly differentiates itself in the position and tracking area, with accuracies that are difficult or impossible to achieve with narrowband technolgies. The communications market, however, is extremely cost sensitive, and the road is littered with cases where the best technology didn't necessarily win, for a large number of reasons.
The companies championing UWB, such as Time Domain, are working hard to make both the technoloy and FCC approval a reality, and over time UWB will probably find significant markets, although it may not completely change the face of the earth overnight.
IBM has been doing this for some time on their mainframes, where it actually makes sense because of the massive amounts of processing power.
I don't have a link handy, but a while ago I read a very interesting essay where the author made the observation that the government doesn't have to legislate or force standards in order to affect a change. The government is such a large purchaser of computers and software that they could simply use their huge purchasing power to influence the market in the direction of open standards if they wanted to. If the government refused to buy into proprietary standards, many companies would support open standards rather than loose a customer that size.
For not inserting a snide insult after the poster's comments this time; they do get
rather old.
No customers contacted by CNET News.com said they planned to evaluate alternative applications
There's your answer on the price issue. Companies obviously feel the cost of changing (retraining, losing interoperability with others, etc) is still greater than the cost of paying Microsoft's monopoly prices (soon to be rents). I wonder just how expensive an OS or Office upgrade must get for them to consider a change as being cost effective? Microsoft will raise prices until they find this point (can't really blame them), and apparently they still have some wiggle room, even as high as their prices have become! Only a very small percentage have gotten pissed off enough to change.
The amazing thing is that companies have switched software before (Visicalc -> 123 -> Excel, Harvard Graphics -> Freelance -> Powerpoint, WordStar -> WordPerfect -> Word, etc.) but this time they seem as stubborn as an ox and much more unwilling to change, perhaps because the number of users to retrain is so much higher than in the "old days".
The problem is that Apple never lowered prices even back when they had much larger than 5% market share. They seem to have long ago decided on a pricing structure that has settled them into a 5% market of loyal users, and they must figure this maximizes profits for them. Increasing market share by lowering prices doesn't seem to be (and never has been) an attractive strategy for Apple, and, as you mention, the more they let their market share slide, the harder it is to do.
They may have been on the right track with the i-Mac, but they didn't keep up the push by upgrading rapidly and continuing to reduce prices, and that one too has languished. It's really a shame--at one point i-Macs were flying off the shelves nearly as fast as Wintel hardware. I had a lot of hope for Apple at that moment.
As someone else mentioned, G4/G5 PPC machines may be a bit better than Intel PCs, but will most people perceive them as being worth nearly _twice_ as much? Whenever I've been in the market for a new PC, I've always checked out the current crop of Mac hardware. Each time, I have liked what I've seen, but simply could not justify paying almost twice as much for similar or at most slightly better performance.
It will be its price.
The acceptance of XP will be slow because it is relatively expensive compared to the added advantages that most users will get. Remember, right now most home users use their PCs to send email and surf the web at 56K. Even serious multimedia users are a small percentage compared to the email/web crowd at this point in time
I will agree that with XP, MS has finally produced a consumer OS that at least comes close to being worthy of the hardware it runs on, even though it attempts to bring with it multimedia format lock-in. With the retail price so high, however, and the fact that MS has made it more difficult to install one copy on multiple PCs, I suspect that only a small percentage of existing PC owners will bother to upgrade off the retail shelf, and even if they do, they may not upgrade all of their machines.
Even medium sized businesses (that don't get huge site licensing deals) will hesitate because of the cost. Our company has already decided to stick with '98 for the time being.
That leaves much of the uptake of XP to new hardware, which will of course come with XP at greatly reduced OEM prices. It will eventually gain dominace though this, and the fact that broadband and multimedia will eventually grow, but the PC market in the US is beginning to saturate as many families now have PCs capable of email and web surfing, and the growth will be slow.
to Email slavery.
1. Treat your email address with the same respect you would give your phone number - only give it out when necessary.
2. Send "remove" replies to spam. It only takes a few seconds and it actually works enough of the time to be worth the few seconds.
3. Check your email only a couple times a day, and let people know that's what you do when you give them your email. Of course, there will be times when something urgent is happening and you will have to break this rule, but most people won't know when that's happening and won't depend on it.
4. For urgent items, have important people use other means to contact you that don't keep you tied to a computer, such as phone, cell phone, pager, ham radio, smoke signals, etc. Less important people can wait for their replies. When I was in college 25 years ago, we had neither email nor cell phones, but somehow urgent things got taken care of.
I'm honestly not sure if the metadata and journal will be fully compatable with Partition Magic.
I'm not sure either. My plan is to try it on a fresh install once I upgrade to RH7.2 and see if it works. If it corrupts everything, no biggie since it was a fresh install.
It may also be that PM might refuse to recognize it if the partition type ID is different for ext3 (which I assume it is, although I don't know for sure).
The nice thing about ext3 in either of these cases is that you can back-convert to ext2, resize the partition, and re-convert to ext3.
BTW, I agree with your comments on alternative partitioning tools; but I have been a PM user for many years and have come to trust it, so I haven't felt like changing even though good GPL'd tools are now available.
ext2 - hmmm, too cold.
ReiserFS - mmmm... too hot.
ext3 - mmmmm.... Ah! Just right!