Linux R&D funding is already well covered
on
Linux Is Going Down
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· Score: 1
Funding for Linux and GNU development and innovation is already in place, and has been for years. It's the sky-high tuition students and parents pay for private colleges, and we taxpayers all pay for public universities and national science foundations. Linux/ GNUstuff will see computer technology become more like scientific & medical research, with ample funding around the world. The best minds on the planet will be well paid as they work, and will compete to "publish first" and garner prestige. Their results (source code) will be subject to peer review, and the best stuff will win in true Darwinist fashion. Anyway,
pace of innovation under this model will accelerate, and money will NOT be a problem. The future is most definitely ours, folks:)
From info available, it seems.Net revolves around 2 things: 1) implementing a data storage "cloud" that can be accessed via any sort of device speaking XML, and 2) removing the language barrier to coding projects, so you can code in Eiffel or C# or others as you see fit. From the way.Net was presented, it had the aura of some diabolical master stroke, Microsoft's V-2 missile that was going to demolish everything. But...the more one ponders.Net, the less useful it seems. For the "data cloud", is there any vendor (or Open Source project) that *doesn't* already plot out universal access, and the use of XML? And if MS is indeed embracing standards--and to some extent this appears true--then they may be embarking on the equivalent of America's War on Drugs, a venture into an unknown battleground where they cannot win..."Any XML your Win2K server can do, my Linux box can serve cheaper". As for the language-neutrality of.Net, it's an interesting feature...but realistically, how often can one imagine development efforts being written in (all of the following) C++, C#, Eiffel, Visual Basic? I reckon we'll continue to see the current model, where development is done in one language (usually Java for new stuff), for the usual reasons: senior gurus can help the new guys through the tough parts, coders can work in pairs (part of the highly successful "extreme programming" movement), and peer review (where it's done) or bug fixes and maintenance are only possible when your developers can read each others' code. So Java will continue to take over...and.Net will make some splash now, but in 5 years I doubt we'll hear much about it.
I like your 4 point summary. The best thing we can all do, I think, is to write/email reporters for newspapers in whatever metro / regional area we each live in. Many papers have an assigned "technology" reporter or two now, this is the kind of stuff they should glom onto, "How you, the consumer, will be shafted unless you read this article!". I'm going to send some letters now.
I think 4 years ago the IT trend thinktank / fuzzy prediction industry was held in higher regard by CIO's, etc. That was because they
scratched an itch, everyone wanted to have a crystal ball, or at least a 3rd party opinion to justify their latest project, etc. **However***
I have seen this change in recent years, largely because the track record of Gartner (in particular) has been so bad. They completely missed
the web, and many other trends. At one place I worked 2 years ago, the CIO, a guy with a business background (not a tech type) looked
at how much we were paying for Gartner, and how often they had been right (very seldom) and quickly fired them. Although these firms
(Gartner, Meta, Yankee , etc.) get quoted a lot by industry rag writers, their actual **influence*** in large IT shops is way down from a
few years ago.
Well, it's not really an electronic patient record, but UC Davis has contributed a nice Java app, "Quickview", with source to the public domain, for summaries and decision support for physicians. Overview, etc. is at:
I've seen the Hotmail site, at Exodus data center in Santa Clara. The real work is done by about 30
Sun E4500 servers, presumably running Informix or
Oracle to be the data store. So the Win2K servers do the easy work of front end presentation, the heavy lifting is done by Unix.
"But we're right!"..echoes of East German STASI
on
The Myth Of The Borg
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· Score: 3
I've heard before that the MS culture promotes a naive sense of knowing what's best for customers, etc. It struck me how much the Microsoft employee mindset is like that of the East German secret police (STASI). Apparently Erich Mielke, the STASI head who ordered all manner of tortures and executions, was genuinely baffled that anyone would not want to be part of the utopian new order. We've seen this mindset before, notably during the Spanish Inquisition. How the Microsoft rendition will end, it's hard to say.
As I recall, Sun has been preaching "the network is the computer" for over a decade. Microsoft is at best *reluctantly* catching up. Millions of devices, most without any plausible need for a desktop with a Start button...that's a world tailor-made for Java/Jini, and Linux. You are correct about the Linux threat to Sun's bottom end. That threat is even more potent vis a vis Microsoft's position with workgroup servers, etc. All in all, Sun's technology and vision is almost perfectly suited to the new order, and Microsoft's efforts to catch up are unconvincing.
Taschek just wants eyeballs, what do you expect?
on
Attacking Open Source
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· Score: 1
don't forget, for non-technical people like journalists and marketing types, the goal is not to be right, or accurate, or have anything original to say. The goal is to attract attention, attention uber alles. Nothing else really matters, to them at least. ZDnet people are no doubt paid according to how many hits they can create/attract. The more outrageous the ZDnet article, the more provocative the challenge, the more successful they are in drawing eyeballs, and getting a good annual performance review by their paymasters at Ziff-Davis.
I'd wondered what would happen if a Microsoft were to dispatch an army of lawyers to see if the GPL could be ruled as 'invalid' in a court of law. This latest creates more precedent for treating copyleft as a First Amendment issue, not a property rights/economic issue. From what I've read, even the most conservative Supreme Court judges regard freedom of speech as sacred, when it comes down to "which principle prevails." So, I think we can sleep a little easier at night now.
Seattle was dead, they say, and here in the Bay Area it was wasn't much better. In the Silicon Valley, San Jose had nothing going on. Further up, in San Francisco, they had fireworks, but apparently only one tenth of the expected number of people showed up. Friends who went to the S.F. fireworks said it was "OK." So it sounds like the U.S. kind of didn't have much fun anyway. We should have all been in Rio de Janeiro, sounds like THAT was something.
My wife is a physician who specializes to some extent in dealing with people who've been in horrible accidents, disasters, etc., and also deals with the rescue workers, medics etc. who have to go in. In a nutshell, the only way that the rescue folks cope over the long haul is a lot of cynical humor, or "gallows humor." The same is true of soldiers in combat. When you're getting slammed every day, you have to make light of the situation somehow.
The Linux tsunami will lift all our boats, whether one owns a particular stock or not. One reason to be sanguine is the nature of Linux companies, which is to spread the wealth beyond just the top execs. So, if you are good with Linux, odds are that within 5 years you will be working for some company that gives equity (stock options, whatever) to ALL workers as a matter of course. So don't sweat it. I think we'll all be doing quite nicely.
I've poked into webserver "pros and cons" and about the only thing that can be said in defense of IIS is that it uses threads. Otherwise, IIS just makes no sense whatsoever (security nightmares abound). It sounds like Apache 2.* will allow one to use threading if desired (just a compile time choice). Once that is there, I can't see how IIS could be technically justified for any situation. I reckon Apache 2 will really raise the bar for web servers all around...looking forward to it!
Scientology is very, very creepy. One has to congratulate the German government for calling a spade a spade, invoking one of West Germany's "let's-not-ever-let-anything-like-Nazism-ever-take -root-here-again" laws against the most overt abuses from Scientology. The Germans got a ton of flack from Scientology for it, but held firm. Good for them.
MS sponsorship does seems suspect. It's funny though, someone else pointed out Microsoft Research is an "intellectual roach motel"--they've been spending enormous sums hiring every academician they can throughout this decade, and have not one achievement to show for it.
Linux Journal had an interesting article recently on Linux vs. Windows performance. As I recall, the same C code compiled on Linux was pretty consistently about 30% faster on Linux than on NT. What this tells me is that skewed scenarios like Mindcraft's are like my challenging my (genetically gifted) younger brother to an athletic competition. There may be times when I can beat him in certain situations of my choosing, but that is all. Similarly, carefully staged performances where NT can beat Linux only postpones the inevitable, when Linux's inherent superiority sweeps NT off the field.
I agree; this lets you run in parallel, low risk
on
E-commerce and Linux
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· Score: 1
I agree with what Bill's suggested. By essentially running in parallel, you're being cautious about not breaking the flow of the business (a good trait) and you can get comfortable with Perl, et. al. and confirm that data imports are happening correctly. Another selling point to your boss is that not only are you replicating and improving on existing functionality under NT, but once on a Linux/Apache platform, a lot of zero-cost *additional* functions can be added as needed. You'll also be much better poised to start taking advantage of XML parsers, etc. when that need comes along.
I forgot to mention, you can sign up for a 2-week free trial of using Zope at codeit.com (an ISP). If you're looking for a way to mess with it, etc., that's a good way, they set me up in less than a day. My wife (non-technical) was able to get the hang of using Zope to manage content in an hour, so it's really good for letting marketing weenies do their own content, etc. without breaking anything.
I've been EXTREMELY impressed with Zope, which has been made Open Source by Digital Creations. It's based on Python, which unfortunately I haven't learned yet, but just playing with Zope, I can say it puts web application frameworks like Domino or MS Site Server to shame. I did see on digicool.com that that they have phone support contracts for Zope, and they're primarily a consulting shop, so I'm sure they'd be able to build a strong E-commerce site using Zope, to your specifications, offer phone support for years afterwards, etc. I am in *no way* affiliated with Digital Creations (I wish I were!), it's just that I've been truly impressed with what they've done with Zope.
Where I work (not my URL) even our very, very stodgy CIO has noted that Gartner's batting average in predicting the future is woefully low. Our company cancelled our subscription to Gartner last month, deeming info from Gartner was not of any value for executive decisionmaking.
I agree, their bit about adding proprietary software is cause for concern. If it's just stuff like Word Perfect, etc. then OK I guess. Let's hope that TurboLinux doesn't try to re-proprietize stuff, and if they do, that RedHat, Debian et.al. grab more marketshare. What else can one say?
A few months ago Jesse of FUDnet was saying something along the lines of "by Christmas, I see the situation changing, with WinCE taking an accelerating lead over the PalmPilot", etc. Heh. I guess not.
At work (not my URL) even the NT admins were annoyed by MS' behavior, trying to ram Win2K DNS down our throats. So the NT guys--to their credit--decided to go with MetaIP from Checkpoint. The one thing I'd like to see from MetaIP would be a little less proprietary approach, then I could endorse them. They talk of a "one-time conversion" of DNS files from human-readable text to some funky proprietary format. As anyone who has administered DNS or mail will attest, you do NOT want your info to be a binary blob that you can't decipher if you start having problems. Anyway, at least Checkpoint pays lip service to standards, and since Checkpoint is an Israeli company, over time they'll be inclined to favor Linux for its technical elegance, accessibility, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Funding for Linux and GNU development and innovation is already in place, and has been for years. It's the sky-high tuition students and parents pay for private colleges, and we taxpayers all pay for public universities and national science foundations. Linux/ GNUstuff will see computer technology become more like scientific & medical research, with ample funding around the world. The best minds on the planet will be well paid as they work, and will compete to "publish first" and garner prestige. Their results (source code) will be subject to peer review, and the best stuff will win in true Darwinist fashion. Anyway, pace of innovation under this model will accelerate, and money will NOT be a problem. The future is most definitely ours, folks :)
Right?
From info available, it seems .Net revolves around 2 things: 1) implementing a data storage "cloud" that can be accessed via any sort of device speaking XML, and 2) removing the language barrier to coding projects, so you can code in Eiffel or C# or others as you see fit. From the way .Net was presented, it had the aura of some diabolical master stroke, Microsoft's V-2 missile that was going to demolish everything. But...the more one ponders .Net, the less useful it seems. For the "data cloud", is there any vendor (or Open Source project) that *doesn't* already plot out universal access, and the use of XML? And if MS is indeed embracing standards--and to some extent this appears true--then they may be embarking on the equivalent of America's War on Drugs, a venture into an unknown battleground where they cannot win..."Any XML your Win2K server can do, my Linux box can serve cheaper". As for the language-neutrality of .Net, it's an interesting feature...but realistically, how often can one imagine development efforts being written in (all of the following) C++, C#, Eiffel, Visual Basic? I reckon we'll continue to see the current model, where development is done in one language (usually Java for new stuff), for the usual reasons: senior gurus can help the new guys through the tough parts, coders can work in pairs (part of the highly successful "extreme programming" movement), and peer review (where it's done) or bug fixes and maintenance are only possible when your developers can read each others' code. So Java will continue to take over...and .Net will make some splash now, but in 5 years I doubt we'll hear much about it.
I like your 4 point summary. The best thing we can all do, I think, is to write /email reporters for newspapers in whatever metro / regional area we each live in. Many papers have an assigned "technology" reporter or two now, this is the kind of stuff they should glom onto, "How you, the consumer, will be shafted unless you read this article!". I'm going to send some letters now.
I think 4 years ago the IT trend thinktank / fuzzy prediction industry was held in higher regard by CIO's, etc. That was because they scratched an itch, everyone wanted to have a crystal ball, or at least a 3rd party opinion to justify their latest project, etc. **However*** I have seen this change in recent years, largely because the track record of Gartner (in particular) has been so bad. They completely missed the web, and many other trends. At one place I worked 2 years ago, the CIO, a guy with a business background (not a tech type) looked at how much we were paying for Gartner, and how often they had been right (very seldom) and quickly fired them. Although these firms (Gartner, Meta, Yankee , etc.) get quoted a lot by industry rag writers, their actual **influence*** in large IT shops is way down from a few years ago.
Well, it's not really an electronic patient record, but UC Davis has contributed a nice Java app, "Quickview", with source to the public domain, for summaries and decision support for physicians. Overview, etc. is at:
http://www.amip.org/catalyst/quickview_html
I've seen the Hotmail site, at Exodus data center in Santa Clara. The real work is done by about 30 Sun E4500 servers, presumably running Informix or Oracle to be the data store. So the Win2K servers do the easy work of front end presentation, the heavy lifting is done by Unix.
I've heard before that the MS culture promotes a naive sense of knowing what's best for customers, etc. It struck me how much the Microsoft employee mindset is like that of the East German secret police (STASI). Apparently Erich Mielke, the STASI head who ordered all manner of tortures and executions, was genuinely baffled that anyone would not want to be part of the utopian new order. We've seen this mindset before, notably during the Spanish Inquisition. How the Microsoft rendition will end, it's hard to say.
As I recall, Sun has been preaching "the network is the computer" for over a decade. Microsoft is at best *reluctantly* catching up. Millions of devices, most without any plausible need for a desktop with a Start button...that's a world tailor-made for Java/Jini, and Linux. You are correct about the Linux threat to Sun's bottom end. That threat is even more potent vis a vis Microsoft's position with workgroup servers, etc. All in all, Sun's technology and vision is almost perfectly suited to the new order, and Microsoft's efforts to catch up are unconvincing.
don't forget, for non-technical people like journalists and marketing types, the goal is not to be right, or accurate, or have anything original to say. The goal is to attract attention, attention uber alles. Nothing else really matters, to them at least. ZDnet people are no doubt paid according to how many hits they can create/attract. The more outrageous the ZDnet article, the more provocative the challenge, the more successful they are in drawing eyeballs, and getting a good annual performance review by their paymasters at Ziff-Davis.
I'd wondered what would happen if a Microsoft were to dispatch an army of lawyers to see if the GPL could be ruled as 'invalid' in a court of law. This latest creates more precedent for treating copyleft as a First Amendment issue, not a property rights/economic issue. From what I've read, even the most conservative Supreme Court judges regard freedom of speech as sacred, when it comes down to "which principle prevails." So, I think we can sleep a little easier at night now.
Seattle was dead, they say, and here in the Bay Area it was wasn't much better. In the Silicon Valley, San Jose had nothing going on. Further up, in San Francisco, they had fireworks, but apparently only one tenth of the expected number of people showed up. Friends who went to the S.F. fireworks said it was "OK." So it sounds like the U.S. kind of didn't have much fun anyway. We should have all been in Rio de Janeiro, sounds like THAT was something.
My wife is a physician who specializes to some extent in dealing with people who've been in horrible accidents, disasters, etc., and also deals with the rescue workers, medics etc. who have to go in. In a nutshell, the only way that the rescue folks cope over the long haul is a lot of cynical humor, or "gallows humor." The same is true of soldiers in combat. When you're getting slammed every day, you have to make light of the situation somehow.
The Linux tsunami will lift all our boats, whether one owns a particular stock or not. One reason to be sanguine is the nature of Linux companies, which is to spread the wealth beyond just the top execs. So, if you are good with Linux, odds are that within 5 years you will be working for some company that gives equity (stock options, whatever) to ALL workers as a matter of course.
So don't sweat it. I think we'll all be doing quite nicely.
I've poked into webserver "pros and cons" and about the only thing that can be said in defense of IIS is that it uses threads. Otherwise, IIS just makes no sense whatsoever (security nightmares abound). It sounds like Apache 2.* will allow one to use threading if desired (just a compile time choice). Once that is there, I can't see how IIS could be technically justified for any situation. I reckon Apache 2 will really raise the bar for web servers all around...looking forward to it!
Scientology is very, very creepy. One has to congratulate the German government for calling a spade a spade, invoking one of West Germany's "let's-not-ever-let-anything-like-Nazism-ever-take -root-here-again" laws against the most overt abuses from Scientology. The Germans got a ton of flack from Scientology for it, but held firm. Good for them.
MS sponsorship does seems suspect. It's funny though, someone else pointed out Microsoft Research is an "intellectual roach motel"--they've been spending enormous sums hiring every academician they can throughout this decade, and have not one achievement to show for it.
Linux Journal had an interesting article recently on Linux vs. Windows performance. As I recall, the same C code compiled on Linux was pretty consistently about 30% faster on Linux than on NT. What this tells me is that skewed scenarios like Mindcraft's are like my challenging my (genetically gifted) younger brother to an athletic competition. There may be times when I can beat him in certain situations of my choosing, but that is all. Similarly, carefully staged performances where NT can beat Linux only postpones the inevitable, when Linux's inherent superiority sweeps NT off the field.
I agree with what Bill's suggested. By essentially running in parallel, you're being cautious about not breaking the flow of the business (a good trait) and you can get comfortable with Perl, et. al. and confirm that data imports are happening correctly.
Another selling point to your boss is that not only are you replicating and improving on existing functionality under NT, but once on a Linux/Apache platform, a lot of zero-cost *additional* functions can be added as needed. You'll also be much better poised to start taking advantage of XML parsers, etc. when that need comes along.
I forgot to mention, you can sign up for a 2-week free trial of using Zope at codeit.com (an ISP). If you're looking for a way to mess with it, etc., that's a good way, they set me up in less than a day. My wife (non-technical) was able to get the hang of using Zope to manage content in an hour, so it's really good for letting marketing weenies do their own content, etc. without breaking anything.
I've been EXTREMELY impressed with Zope, which has been made Open Source by Digital Creations. It's based on Python, which unfortunately I haven't learned yet, but just playing with Zope, I can say it puts web application frameworks like Domino or MS Site Server to shame. I did see on digicool.com that that they have phone support contracts for Zope, and they're primarily a consulting shop, so I'm sure they'd be able to build a strong E-commerce site using Zope, to your specifications, offer phone support for years afterwards, etc. I am in *no way* affiliated with Digital Creations (I wish I were!), it's just that I've been truly impressed with what they've done with Zope.
Where I work (not my URL) even our very, very stodgy CIO has noted that Gartner's batting average in predicting the future is woefully low. Our company cancelled our subscription to Gartner last month, deeming info from Gartner was not of any value for executive decisionmaking.
I agree, their bit about adding proprietary software is cause for concern. If it's just stuff like Word Perfect, etc. then OK I guess.
Let's hope that TurboLinux doesn't try to re-proprietize stuff, and if they do, that RedHat, Debian et.al. grab more marketshare. What else can one say?
A few months ago Jesse of FUDnet was saying something along the lines of "by Christmas, I see the situation changing, with WinCE taking an accelerating lead over the PalmPilot", etc.
Heh. I guess not.
At work (not my URL) even the NT admins were annoyed by MS' behavior, trying to ram Win2K DNS down our throats. So the NT guys--to their credit--decided to go with MetaIP from Checkpoint. The one thing I'd like to see from MetaIP would be a little less proprietary approach, then I could endorse them. They talk of a "one-time conversion" of DNS files from human-readable text to some funky proprietary format. As anyone who has administered DNS or mail will attest, you do NOT want your info to be a binary blob that you can't decipher if you start having problems. Anyway, at least Checkpoint pays lip service to standards, and since Checkpoint is an Israeli company, over time they'll be inclined to favor Linux for its technical elegance, accessibility, etc.