The Intel Linux compiler will be optimized for the P4 and so there will be at least one compiler up to the job. It will cost money, but if you are really after top performance, you will probably not let a few hundred dollars stand in the way. It appears Intel is trying to make it compatable with gcc (and eventually g++), so ultimately (though not with the beta) you can link in your high performance modules with the vast array of existing libraries that have been compiled with gcc.
The interesting thing will be to see how well gcc becomes optimized for the Itanium processor, since Intel's long term plans are really to push this as the future workhorse of high performance computing. Since gcc must start over from scratch with this architecture anyway, maybe it will start out more optimized than gcc for x86, which has had to work with everything from the 386 to the P4.
Of course GCC is available for win2k; however it is very seldom (if ever) used for serious commerical applications. Yes, it is used for porting UNIX applications, and these applications tend to run more slowly than their native windows counterparts. I have nothing against Win2k, and I use Win2K as well as Linux and HP-UX, it's just that the performance of GCC on win32 should be relatively irrelevent to someone who uses Win2k exclusively (and his is sig implies that he uses Windows exclusively), except in the rare circumstance that they are porting a UNIX/Linux app, or are using GCC because it's free in which case they are probably not developing an ultra high performance application.
On the other hand, GCC *does* matter for Linux. It is true that most apps run just fine on Linux compiled with GCC. But clearly newer x86 processors are becoming more specialized and there are applications where every drop of performance counts. I do large circuit simulations, and a 10% improvement could mean getting results hours sooner. For Linux to compete seriously in these areas the apps will have to be compiled with a compiler who's results can compete with what's available under win32.
There has been much talk recently about the viability of linux on the desktop. IBM's commitment to Linux is well known within the Linux community, but so far this commitment has been primarily server side.
With IBM's large stake in Linux, and IBM's large size as a company, it seems that IBM would be in a unique position to help push Linux onto the desktop. If IBM were to adopt Linux as its primary desktop operating system within the company, it would surely and quickly act as a catalyst to boost the credibility of Linux on the desktop within the corporate world and would likely spur more software vendors into considering Linux versions of their corporate desktop software, especially those who have been sitting on the fence, like Adobe, and even IBM itself (with Notes, for example).
Is there any movement within IBM to increase the importance of Linux on the desktop, even perhaps adopting Linux as a significant desktop operating system within IBM?
I agree with this problem, which is why I suggest that static linking be used primarily for the bleeding edge libraries - especially any library that is more recent than the most up to date included in the majority of current distributions.
Once the library used by the program is less bleeding edge and has a more stable API, then dynamic linking would be more appropriate.
One of the original reasons behind DLLs in the first place was to save redundant disk space and memory. This is still true, but when DLLs were first popularized on PCs by Windows 2.x (or whatever it was), most machines had a 20-30Mb hard drive and 1Mb of RAM.
Things have changed. While the larger, most common libraries (GTK, QT, glibc, X libs, gnome and kde libs) should remain dynamic, it would be helpful for binary packagers to statically link the smaller and more obscure libraries, especially if they are using a bleeding edge version that is not even in the most current distributions.
With a combination of static and dynamic linking, you'll achieve the majority of the benefit of shared libs because your largest and most common libs will be dynamic, but you'll be able to avoid much of the DLL hell and upgrade hell that accompanies packages that use bleeding edge libraries.
Artists bypassing the recording industry and taking advantage of the new egalitarian distribution medium (the Internet) is the obvious sloution that is always brought up in these discussions.
The problem is that for current established artists, there is significant momentum and acceptance of the current system. I think it has less to do with laziness and stupidity than a fear of an unknown, largely untested paradigm. To some degree, this fear is not entirely unfounded.
This issue sort of parallels the discussions of Linux on the desktop that were taking place a couple of weeks ago. I can make rational arguments to my company management about why it might make sense for us to switch to Linux and other open source software on the desktop, but the company is run by established businessmen who have done things a certain way for a long time, and what they have been doing largely works. They just don't see that the benefits of the change outweigh the costs and perceived disadvantages.
So, don't count on established artists to make the change. It will be new and upcoming artists that will see the new distribution medium as a viable option, just as it will be today's college students that will push Linux onto the desktop once they go forth and start their own companies. But unfortunatly, this means that the transition will take time. It won't happen overnight. Once the first new artist makes it big this way, then perhaps it will snowball and become a popular means of distribution.
W have a 12 year old son who likes to use computers. At one point we decided that the amount of time spent playing computer video games had gotten out of hand.
He is good in math and science, so I figured he was bright enough to learn programming. So, now the requirement is that for every hour he spends playing StarCraft, he must spend another hour of his time time learning programming and writing programs of his choice. His total computer time (outside of homework) is also limited.
It has worked out great. He is learning Java (he heard that's what he'll need to use in high school and college), and has begun writing some simple but interesting programs.
The end result is that he gets his recreation (games), but also comes away with some "real" computer skills that will be useful to him later in life.
It is a fact that Linux faces many obsticles on the desktop. Although it is catching up fast, there is still a gap in productivity and end user applications, it is still harder to setup and use for non-technical users, and it still lacks certain functional consistency (look at font handling, for example, and I'm not talking about anti-aliasing, but consistency across screen, printing, and applications).
I am 43 years old and work for a company run by 50 year olds. I'm one of only a couple of Linux users around here, and certainly the oldest one. It will be a long time before I can convince the company management to switch desktops to Linux, expecially since there are still perceived and real shortcomings.
But Linux is very popular among technical college and university students. What will happen in another few years when tens of thousands of college students who have grown up on Linux go into the workforce. Certainly some of them will either start their own companies or move into decision making positions in existing ones. You will begin to see Linux on the desktop, and increased demand for Linux applications. The timing will be very good for this because by that time, most of Linux's desktop shortcomings will have been addressed.
Success (if not dominance) on the desktop will take the longest of any area, but it will eventually happen.
Ximian and Eazel have tried a business model that revolved around producing a free product and making money on service. They also started doing this from scratch, without having any existing for-profit product to back them up. Perhaps this isn't the most viable of all open source business models.
Other models include such things as packaging and selling a configuration (most Linux distributors), producing a combination of both for-profit and free software products (The Kompany), gathering support from larger companies who will benefit from using the free software (Samba, Apache), and larger companies who feel that producing open source software will ultimately benefit their for-profit product lines (IBM, Sun).
I wouldn't give up all hope just because the Ximian/Eazel service-based business model is faltering. Some of the other open source projects/business models seem to be meeting with more success.
A fairly inexpensive way to go is to use an "everything-on-board" microATX MB, such as the ASUS CUSL2-M (PIII + i815 video + LAN + audio) and put it into a ultra mini case such as the YY A101 Tiny Tower. (The audio on the CUSL2-M is not well supported under Linux, so you may need to cough up an extra $20 for a SB16 sound card if you are using Linux, as I did).
If you're running Linux or UNIX and not using hardware accelerated 3D, you can use your laptop as the "monitor", by using it as an X terminal (or using VNC if you like that better). If you need HW accelerated 3D or are using windows, you will still need to drag a monitor around:(.
Many of the posts here seem to point out either explicitly or implicitly that the operating system needs of technical users and "regular" (presumably non-technical) usres are quite different. Technical users want more system level choices, more configurability, more capability to compile programs from source and improve those programs, etc., etc., while normal users don't really care about this and just want to "get the job done".
It seems that there is a fundamental fork occurring in the overall user community towards a technical fork and a non-technical fork. Perhaps this was inevitable. In the DOS days, using a computer was a fairly technical task. Non-technical people could use PC's, but they almost always needed help from a technically knowlegable person from time to time. Over time, the dumbing-down efforts by Microsoft and Apple have resulted in systems that are easier for non-technical users to use without as much help, but are not very satisfying for technically inclined users. The trend is exacerbated by the fact that the PC has now also become a major communication and entertainment platform, greatly increasing the number of "normal" turnkey users.
As a result perhaps there is really no one-size-fits-all operating system for all users, at least not at this point in time. Most non-technical users will chose windows or macOS, which they view as the default easy-to-user configuration. While technical users have always had a choice to use something else (be it UNIX or OS/2 or something else), Linux now gives them a very usable alternative with a rapidly growing user and software base, and more importantly, a technical flavor.
Is this really a bad thing? It probably depends on your perspective. RedHat and other Linux distributors would obviously like to see more acceptance among normal users, while many hackers free software "purists" probably don't care as much.
Perhaps in a year or two, KDE or Gnome will have reached the stage of providing a shell over Linux that makes it as easy or easier to setup and use than windows or macOS, and at that time, you might begin to see the migration of normal users, particularly if the price of windows upgrades continues to rise. But util then, there will be a techno-savviness gap between Linux and windows users.
Your comments about Microsoft document formats being de facto standards is correct (at least at this point in time - remember when WordPerfect was a standard?, or Lotus 123?, or Harvard Graphics?, etc., etc., etc.)
The whole point of the article is that this is not a good way to create standards, because standards created in this way heavily favor the monopolist market leader and tend to stymie competition. Standards created this way also cause compatability problems even within users of that standard because the economic concerns of the standard creator (e.g., selling more upgrades) take precedence to the economic concerns of the users of the products. This is why almost no proprietary standards are even partially forward compatable.
As a example, take HTML, which is a more-or-less open standard. I can open a modern web page using an older browser like Netscape 2 or even Mosaic. I will not see the formatting provided by the newer features of subsequent versions of the HTML standard, but I can at least open the document and see the information, even if it is not formatted correctly. With a Word, WordPerfect, or Excel document, you can't even open the document at all with an older version, even if there have been very few changes to the format.
The article simply makes the point that it is the entire industry that should determine an open standard in preference to a single company determining a proprietary one.
Now, often open industry standards work well, and sometimes they don't, I've seen it both ways. But the article proposes that forcing Microsoft (and other companies) to adhere to open industry standards would be a way of removing the "increasing returns" nature of the market and allow companies to compete without an artificial "natural monopoly" advantage.
One possible way to gain credibility in opposing this is to propose an alternative solution that provides some measure of content protection without requiring disruptive changes to the disk drive standards.
It seems to me that the burden could be moved from the hardware to the software. There are already many software packages that implement copy protection by attaching themselves to either the ethernet MAC address or the hard disk serial number that already exists in current hard drives (Mathematica uses *both*). Presumably, a closed source media player could be designed that does the same thing - the media file is encrypted using a key that is dependent on the HD serial number or ethernet MAC address.
This may be a little less secure than the CPRM approach because it probably possible to write hacks that can intercept the program's request for the serial number or MAC address, but it would likely provide adaquate copy protection for the vast majority of the consuming public. Even though it may not be completely uncrackable, this scheme is still used to protect $10,000 software programs in preference to dongles, primarily because it's less inconvenient for users and cheaper for the vendors.
Even though it may not be quite as secure as CPRM, it has the advantage of not requiring changes to drive specs and would prevent all of the negative side effects described in the articles.
There may be reasons I didn't think of why this won't work, but suggesting *some* workable alternative will gain more credibility than just crying "I want my freebies, content protection sucks!"
" Anywho, DOC is a biz standard. This isn't going to change."
Remember when WordPerfect was a "biz standard"?
Remember when Wordstar was a biz standard?
Remember when Lotus 123 was a biz standard?
Remember when Freelance Graphics was a biz standard?
Remember when Harvard Graphics was a biz standard?
Remember when IBM Selectric was a biz standard? . . .
Pretty pitiful to think we live in a world where nothing ever changes.
"Who wants to bet that if either ever went bankrupt that the Office company would be the last standing?"
It may be difficult to find a completely open solution that runs on all platforms and has easy WYSIWYG editing (assuming you want this), so if, for political reasons, you end up having to choose between Word and FrameMaker, at least choose FrameMaker. At the behest of the engineering department, our company recently dumped Word in favor of FrameMaker for several reasons:
1. It runs on more platforms - It doesn't run on Linux, but it runs on the MAC, Windows, and most popular UNIX variants including Solaris and HP-UX.
2. It supports SGML. This lets you solve the bit rot problem even though you may be using a proprietary tool and proprietary intermediate format.
3. The MIF interchange format is robust and is both forward and backward compatable if you are careful - we have been able to easily move documents back and forth between Frame 5.x and 6.0 using the MIF format. The MIF format is also a documented and parsable text format and as such is more portable than.doc
4. It's already a de-facto standard in large standards bodies (such as IEEE 802.3, which I deal with).
If you want near-WYSIWYG editing tools, TeX/LaTeX is only a good choice if you stay in UNIX, since there are no good near-WYSIWYG editing tools (that I know of) for MAC, and perhaps not even for Windows.
The recent apparent increase in the rate at which the "software police" are being called out is basically the result of sagging software profits, especially as it relates to Microsoft. Click here if you want a very thourogh quarter-by-quarter analysis of how Microsoft has been making less money on software and more money on banking and venture capital over the last two years. Consider the following factors:
Recent reports have shown that the US market for PC's is at least beginning to saturate (it hasn't actually saturated). This will slow sales in the US market.
Except for a handful of small wealthier nations (e.g., Taiwan, Singapore, etc.) most second and third world countries are too poor per capita to pay the high prices for American commercial software. The software police will never be able to keep up with the amount of piracy in these countries.
The one remaining affluent market that is not yet saturating is Europe, but as a whole Europeans are much more open to free alternatives to expensive commercial software.
As a result of this, I think we will be seeing much more of the Microsoft police in the future as Microsoft and other large software vendors attempt to replace the lost revenue. Even our company has received Microsoft/BSA letter and we only have a few hundred employees.
This is really old news. There was an article in Discover Magazine several months ago about this machine (or one nearly identical, if not this exact one). A few days ago there was another article on Slashdot about a "new" digital camera watch that I have been seeing for nearly six months in various trinket catalogs that show up in the mail.
Also a few days ago I submitted an article about Synopsys' plans to switch from NT to Linux as their second tier platform for all of their digital ASIC synthesis and simulation software, effectively creating one of the hugest endorsements possible of Linux in the ASIC EDA industry. This article, which contained information just released that day that one would think would be of interest to the Linux and engineering communities, was rejected, and instead we get articles about year-old camera watches and things that appeared in science magazines four months ago.
With all due respect, it seems like those "trained mammals" have been spending a little too much time in their cages without a break.
.NET, like Java, is an attempt to provide an appliation framework for the internet. With only 30%-40% or so of internet servers running on Microsoft platforms, they have to port the server side of.NET or it will die on the vine. (Unless, of course, they are arrogant enough to think that the mere existance of.NET will instantly bring them to 100% server market share.)
On the client side, it is also to their advantage to port it because this will give them credibility in competetion with Java. The fact that they will be releasing the C# language specification to an open standards body unfortunately already gives them a head start on the credibility. Client side support for other platforms also means they can extend their Office monopoly onto other platforms without having to port it more than once (to.NET).
Despite all this, however, you can likely count on the Windows implementations being much more optimized, at least at first, and they will use this as leverage to try to increase there presence on the server side, where it currently lags more.
He has a right to have libelous or slanderous information removed. I seriously doubt that inaccurate guesses about film story lines would fall into this category. He certainly has a right to refute the information on his own web site or other publications, however, and he can ask that they be removed. (He can even threaten lawsuits, which may work in many cases even if the lawsuit
is groundless.)
Obviously the ISP knew better since they refused to close down the site without a court order.
The argument that currently popular Windows applications haven't been ported to Linux is commonly made, and while this is generally true, it may bode worse for those applications than for Linux.
If one looks at the currently popular Windows applications of a given class (word processor, spreadsheet, etc.), those applications were not always the most popular ones. In fact the major shifts in application popularity corresponds remarkably well with major shifts in platform popularity. In particular, both the market shift from CP/M and Apple II to DOS and from DOS to Windows were both accompanied by a toppling of the popular productivity applications at the time (e.g., Visicalc -> Lotus 1-2-3 -> Excel).
Of course the correlations are not 100% and there were other factors, but in general, the best applications on the newer platform tended to supplant the popular applications on the old platform. In many cases, this was due to the older applications not being ported to the newer platform -- for example Lotus took too long to come out with a decent Windows version of 1-2-3 and hence lost their market to Microsoft, who had a Windows version ready even before Windows was a popular stand-alone product; same thing with WordPerfect.
The bottom line is that Windows application vendors that don't port to Linux/BSD are taking a gamble - if Linux becomes a big desktop platform, these applications will risk loosing much of their ubiquity.
Is this a true networkable remote display capability ala X? Has Microsoft has finally realized (more than a decade after X) that being able to display graphical apps on a remote display is useful? How innovative!:-). If so, I guess it's bye-bye PCanywhere...
Slashdot Mirror
Tiemann said, "but I think we
would be happy to support it in the way we've supported a lot of other initiatives to support
choice."
Hey, I can support that!
If we americans cant lern how to spel
corectly, we wil never get the respec we
so writefully deserv.
The Intel Linux compiler will be optimized for the P4 and so there will be at least one compiler up to the job. It will cost money, but if you are really after top performance, you will probably not let a few hundred dollars stand in the way. It appears Intel is trying to make it compatable with gcc (and eventually g++), so ultimately (though not with the beta) you can link in your high performance modules with the vast array of existing libraries that have been compiled with gcc.
The interesting thing will be to see how well gcc becomes optimized for the Itanium processor, since Intel's long term plans are really to push this as the future workhorse of high performance computing. Since gcc must start over from scratch with this architecture anyway, maybe it will start out more optimized than gcc for x86, which has had to work with everything from the 386 to the P4.
Of course GCC is available for win2k; however it is very seldom (if ever) used for serious commerical applications. Yes, it is used for porting UNIX applications, and these applications tend to run more slowly than their native windows counterparts. I have nothing against Win2k, and I use Win2K as well as Linux and HP-UX, it's just that the performance of GCC on win32 should be relatively irrelevent to someone who uses Win2k exclusively (and his is sig implies that he uses Windows exclusively), except in the rare circumstance that they are porting a UNIX/Linux app, or are using GCC because it's free in which case they are probably not developing an ultra high performance application.
On the other hand, GCC *does* matter for Linux. It is true that most apps run just fine on Linux compiled with GCC. But clearly newer x86 processors are becoming more specialized and there are applications where every drop of performance counts. I do large circuit simulations, and a 10% improvement could mean getting results hours sooner. For Linux to compete seriously in these areas the apps will have to be compiled with a compiler who's results can compete with what's available under win32.
Why does this matter so much if you're happily running Win2K?
There has been much talk recently about the viability of linux on the desktop. IBM's commitment to Linux is well known within the Linux community, but so far this commitment has been primarily server side.
With IBM's large stake in Linux, and IBM's large size as a company, it seems that IBM would be in a unique position to help push Linux onto the desktop. If IBM were to adopt Linux as its primary desktop operating system within the company, it would surely and quickly act as a catalyst to boost the credibility of Linux on the desktop within the corporate world and would likely spur more software vendors into considering Linux versions of their corporate desktop software, especially those who have been sitting on the fence, like Adobe, and even IBM itself (with Notes, for example).
Is there any movement within IBM to increase the importance of Linux on the desktop, even perhaps adopting Linux as a significant desktop operating system within IBM?
I agree with this problem, which is why I suggest that static linking be used primarily for the bleeding edge libraries - especially any library that is more recent than the most up to date included in the majority of current distributions.
Once the library used by the program is less bleeding edge and has a more stable API, then dynamic linking would be more appropriate.
One of the original reasons behind DLLs in the first place was to save redundant disk space and memory. This is still true, but when DLLs were first popularized on PCs by Windows 2.x (or whatever it was), most machines had a 20-30Mb hard drive and 1Mb of RAM.
Things have changed. While the larger, most common libraries (GTK, QT, glibc, X libs, gnome and kde libs) should remain dynamic, it would be helpful for binary packagers to statically link the smaller and more obscure libraries, especially if they are using a bleeding edge version that is not even in the most current distributions.
With a combination of static and dynamic linking, you'll achieve the majority of the benefit of shared libs because your largest and most common libs will be dynamic, but you'll be able to avoid much of the DLL hell and upgrade hell that accompanies packages that use bleeding edge libraries.
Artists bypassing the recording industry and taking advantage of the new egalitarian distribution medium (the Internet) is the obvious sloution that is always brought up in these discussions.
The problem is that for current established artists, there is significant momentum and acceptance of the current system. I think it has less to do with laziness and stupidity than a fear of an unknown, largely untested paradigm. To some degree, this fear is not entirely unfounded.
This issue sort of parallels the discussions of Linux on the desktop that were taking place a couple of weeks ago. I can make rational arguments to my company management about why it might make sense for us to switch to Linux and other open source software on the desktop, but the company is run by established businessmen who have done things a certain way for a long time, and what they have been doing largely works. They just don't see that the benefits of the change outweigh the costs and perceived disadvantages.
So, don't count on established artists to make the change. It will be new and upcoming artists that will see the new distribution medium as a viable option, just as it will be today's college students that will push Linux onto the desktop once they go forth and start their own companies. But unfortunatly, this means that the transition will take time. It won't happen overnight. Once the first new artist makes it big this way, then perhaps it will snowball and become a popular means of distribution.
W have a 12 year old son who likes to use computers. At one point we decided that the amount of time spent playing computer video games had gotten out of hand.
He is good in math and science, so I figured he was bright enough to learn programming. So, now the requirement is that for every hour he spends playing StarCraft, he must spend another hour of his time time learning programming and writing programs of his choice. His total computer time (outside of homework) is also limited.
It has worked out great. He is learning Java (he heard that's what he'll need to use in high school and college), and has begun writing some simple but interesting programs.
The end result is that he gets his recreation (games), but also comes away with some "real" computer skills that will be useful to him later in life.
Have the results of this usability testing been released or posted back to the Gnome mailing lists? I would be curious to see the results.
It is a fact that Linux faces many obsticles on the desktop. Although it is catching up fast, there is still a gap in productivity and end user applications, it is still harder to setup and use for non-technical users, and it still lacks certain functional consistency (look at font handling, for example, and I'm not talking about anti-aliasing, but consistency across screen, printing, and applications).
I am 43 years old and work for a company run by 50 year olds. I'm one of only a couple of Linux users around here, and certainly the oldest one. It will be a long time before I can convince the company management to switch desktops to Linux, expecially since there are still perceived and real shortcomings.
But Linux is very popular among technical college and university students. What will happen in another few years when tens of thousands of college students who have grown up on Linux go into the workforce. Certainly some of them will either start their own companies or move into decision making positions in existing ones. You will begin to see Linux on the desktop, and increased demand for Linux applications. The timing will be very good for this because by that time, most of Linux's desktop shortcomings will have been addressed.
Success (if not dominance) on the desktop will take the longest of any area, but it will eventually happen.
Ximian and Eazel have tried a business model that revolved around producing a free product and making money on service. They also started doing this from scratch, without having any existing for-profit product to back them up. Perhaps this isn't the most viable of all open source business models.
Other models include such things as packaging and selling a configuration (most Linux distributors), producing a combination of both for-profit and free software products (The Kompany), gathering support from larger companies who will benefit from using the free software (Samba, Apache), and larger companies who feel that producing open source software will ultimately benefit their for-profit product lines (IBM, Sun).
I wouldn't give up all hope just because the Ximian/Eazel service-based business model is faltering. Some of the other open source projects/business models seem to be meeting with more success.
Look here for some info on the case.
If you're running Linux or UNIX and not using hardware accelerated 3D, you can use your laptop as the "monitor", by using it as an X terminal (or using VNC if you like that better). If you need HW accelerated 3D or are using windows, you will still need to drag a monitor around :(.
It seems that there is a fundamental fork occurring in the overall user community towards a technical fork and a non-technical fork. Perhaps this was inevitable. In the DOS days, using a computer was a fairly technical task. Non-technical people could use PC's, but they almost always needed help from a technically knowlegable person from time to time. Over time, the dumbing-down efforts by Microsoft and Apple have resulted in systems that are easier for non-technical users to use without as much help, but are not very satisfying for technically inclined users. The trend is exacerbated by the fact that the PC has now also become a major communication and entertainment platform, greatly increasing the number of "normal" turnkey users.
As a result perhaps there is really no one-size-fits-all operating system for all users, at least not at this point in time. Most non-technical users will chose windows or macOS, which they view as the default easy-to-user configuration. While technical users have always had a choice to use something else (be it UNIX or OS/2 or something else), Linux now gives them a very usable alternative with a rapidly growing user and software base, and more importantly, a technical flavor.
Is this really a bad thing? It probably depends on your perspective. RedHat and other Linux distributors would obviously like to see more acceptance among normal users, while many hackers free software "purists" probably don't care as much.
Perhaps in a year or two, KDE or Gnome will have reached the stage of providing a shell over Linux that makes it as easy or easier to setup and use than windows or macOS, and at that time, you might begin to see the migration of normal users, particularly if the price of windows upgrades continues to rise. But util then, there will be a techno-savviness gap between Linux and windows users.
Your comments about Microsoft document formats being de facto standards is correct (at least at this point in time - remember when WordPerfect was a standard?, or Lotus 123?, or Harvard Graphics?, etc., etc., etc.)
The whole point of the article is that this is not a good way to create standards, because standards created in this way heavily favor the monopolist market leader and tend to stymie competition. Standards created this way also cause compatability problems even within users of that standard because the economic concerns of the standard creator (e.g., selling more upgrades) take precedence to the economic concerns of the users of the products. This is why almost no proprietary standards are even partially forward compatable.
As a example, take HTML, which is a more-or-less open standard. I can open a modern web page using an older browser like Netscape 2 or even Mosaic. I will not see the formatting provided by the newer features of subsequent versions of the HTML standard, but I can at least open the document and see the information, even if it is not formatted correctly. With a Word, WordPerfect, or Excel document, you can't even open the document at all with an older version, even if there have been very few changes to the format.
The article simply makes the point that it is the entire industry that should determine an open standard in preference to a single company determining a proprietary one.
Now, often open industry standards work well, and sometimes they don't, I've seen it both ways. But the article proposes that forcing Microsoft (and other companies) to adhere to open industry standards would be a way of removing the "increasing returns" nature of the market and allow companies to compete without an artificial "natural monopoly" advantage.
One possible way to gain credibility in opposing this is to propose an alternative solution that provides some measure of content protection without requiring disruptive changes to the disk drive standards.
It seems to me that the burden could be moved from the hardware to the software. There are already many software packages that implement copy protection by attaching themselves to either the ethernet MAC address or the hard disk serial number that already exists in current hard drives (Mathematica uses *both*). Presumably, a closed source media player could be designed that does the same thing - the media file is encrypted using a key that is dependent on the HD serial number or ethernet MAC address.
This may be a little less secure than the CPRM approach because it probably possible to write hacks that can intercept the program's request for the serial number or MAC address, but it would likely provide adaquate copy protection for the vast majority of the consuming public. Even though it may not be completely uncrackable, this scheme is still used to protect $10,000 software programs in preference to dongles, primarily because it's less inconvenient for users and cheaper for the vendors.
Even though it may not be quite as secure as CPRM, it has the advantage of not requiring changes to drive specs and would prevent all of the negative side effects described in the articles.
There may be reasons I didn't think of why this won't work, but suggesting *some* workable alternative will gain more credibility than just crying "I want my freebies, content protection sucks!"
" Anywho, DOC is a biz standard. This isn't going to change."
Remember when WordPerfect was a "biz standard"?
Remember when Wordstar was a biz standard?
Remember when Lotus 123 was a biz standard?
Remember when Freelance Graphics was a biz standard?
Remember when Harvard Graphics was a biz standard?
Remember when IBM Selectric was a biz standard? . . .
Pretty pitiful to think we live in a world where nothing ever changes.
"Who wants to bet that if either ever went bankrupt that the Office company would be the last standing?"
No question there.
It may be difficult to find a completely open solution that runs on all platforms and has easy WYSIWYG editing (assuming you want this), so if, for political reasons, you end up having to choose between Word and FrameMaker, at least choose FrameMaker. At the behest of the engineering department, our company recently dumped Word in favor of FrameMaker for several reasons:
1. It runs on more platforms - It doesn't run on Linux, but it runs on the MAC, Windows, and most popular UNIX variants including Solaris and HP-UX.
2. It supports SGML. This lets you solve the bit rot problem even though you may be using a proprietary tool and proprietary intermediate format.
3. The MIF interchange format is robust and is both forward and backward compatable if you are careful - we have been able to easily move documents back and forth between Frame 5.x and 6.0 using the MIF format. The MIF format is also a documented and parsable text format and as such is more portable than
4. It's already a de-facto standard in large standards bodies (such as IEEE 802.3, which I deal with).
If you want near-WYSIWYG editing tools, TeX/LaTeX is only a good choice if you stay in UNIX, since there are no good near-WYSIWYG editing tools (that I know of) for MAC, and perhaps not even for Windows.
Recent reports have shown that the US market for PC's is at least beginning to saturate (it hasn't actually saturated). This will slow sales in the US market.
Except for a handful of small wealthier nations (e.g., Taiwan, Singapore, etc.) most second and third world countries are too poor per capita to pay the high prices for American commercial software. The software police will never be able to keep up with the amount of piracy in these countries.
The one remaining affluent market that is not yet saturating is Europe, but as a whole Europeans are much more open to free alternatives to expensive commercial software.
As a result of this, I think we will be seeing much more of the Microsoft police in the future as Microsoft and other large software vendors attempt to replace the lost revenue. Even our company has received Microsoft/BSA letter and we only have a few hundred employees.
This is really old news. There was an article in Discover Magazine several months ago about this machine (or one nearly identical, if not this exact one). A few days ago there was another article on Slashdot about a "new" digital camera watch that I have been seeing for nearly six months in various trinket catalogs that show up in the mail.
Also a few days ago I submitted an article about Synopsys' plans to switch from NT to Linux as their second tier platform for all of their digital ASIC synthesis and simulation software, effectively creating one of the hugest endorsements possible of Linux in the ASIC EDA industry. This article, which contained information just released that day that one would think would be of interest to the Linux and engineering communities, was rejected, and instead we get articles about year-old camera watches and things that appeared in science magazines four months ago.
With all due respect, it seems like those "trained mammals" have been spending a little too much time in their cages without a break.
.NET, like Java, is an attempt to provide an appliation framework for the internet. With only 30%-40% or so of internet servers running on Microsoft platforms, they have to port the server side of .NET or it will die on the vine. (Unless, of course, they are arrogant enough to think that the mere existance of .NET will instantly bring them to 100% server market share.)
.NET).
On the client side, it is also to their advantage to port it because this will give them credibility in competetion with Java. The fact that they will be releasing the C# language specification to an open standards body unfortunately already gives them a head start on the credibility. Client side support for other platforms also means they can extend their Office monopoly onto other platforms without having to port it more than once (to
Despite all this, however, you can likely count on the Windows implementations being much more optimized, at least at first, and they will use this as leverage to try to increase there presence on the server side, where it currently lags more.
He has a right to have libelous or slanderous information removed. I seriously doubt that inaccurate guesses about film story lines would fall into this category. He certainly has a right to refute the information on his own web site or other publications, however, and he can ask that they be removed. (He can even threaten lawsuits, which may work in many cases even if the lawsuit
is groundless.)
Obviously the ISP knew better since they refused to close down the site without a court order.
The argument that currently popular Windows applications haven't been ported to Linux is commonly made, and while this is generally true, it may bode worse for those applications than for Linux.
If one looks at the currently popular Windows applications of a given class (word processor, spreadsheet, etc.), those applications were not always the most popular ones. In fact the major shifts in application popularity corresponds remarkably well with major shifts in platform popularity. In particular, both the market shift from CP/M and Apple II to DOS and from DOS to Windows were both accompanied by a toppling of the popular productivity applications at the time (e.g., Visicalc -> Lotus 1-2-3 -> Excel).
Of course the correlations are not 100% and there were other factors, but in general, the best applications on the newer platform tended to supplant the popular applications on the old platform. In many cases, this was due to the older applications not being ported to the newer platform -- for example Lotus took too long to come out with a decent Windows version of 1-2-3 and hence lost their market to Microsoft, who had a Windows version ready even before Windows was a popular stand-alone product; same thing with WordPerfect.
The bottom line is that Windows application vendors that don't port to Linux/BSD are taking a gamble - if Linux becomes a big desktop platform, these applications will risk loosing much of their ubiquity.
Is this a true networkable remote display capability ala X? Has Microsoft has finally realized (more than a decade after X) that being able to display graphical apps on a remote display is useful? How innovative! :-). If so, I guess it's bye-bye PCanywhere...