I consider myself to be a newbie and have found the notion that redhat is really different from other distro's to be pure FUD. By difference I mean from the users point of view.
I'm a redhat user and below is my account of a forway with another distribution.
I started dicking around with redhat 5.2 and from 6.0 used it as my sole desktop, before that I'd had a small ammount of experience with Xenix and QNX, (not system administrator, just a normal user).
About a week ago I set up an apache/php/postgresql server for my department on company intranet. The distribution I used was debian powerpc.
From what I'd heard I was expecting a pretty rough ride, "redhat is for newbies", "debian is for the experienced", "redhat is making thier distro incomapitible..." etc.
I've got the say the differences I found were minor! All I needed was a bit of "find / -name... " to see where debian puts things and SMALL ammount of RTFM for the rest. This was all done on the command line and I've got to say that anyone who can't handle the differences is probably in the wrong proffession!
It seems pretty obvious that Pioneer 10 was the product of a different era where pride and sound engineering was the goal.
28 years of operation, that is simply increadible!
I can't help but wonder if today's "Cheaper Better Faster" projects will last beyond their specs. Pioneer 10 like so much science before it has provided benifits that the originators never would have forseen.
To the engineers and scientists that built it, I take my hat of too you.
My point wasn't that brand matters the most, just that it does matter. Any company that doesn't do it won't be around too long.
I don't believe that a highly visible brand means that one company will rule the market. Take the Mac when it was first released, amazingly strong brand (Apple), huge marketing blitz (superbowl ads etc.) but after the initial buz it failed in the market because it was an inferior product (single floppy, no harddrive, not enough ram etc). It wasn't untill they fixed these things that the Mac took off, no ammount of marketing make up for the a product.
It's interesting to look at how reverse engineering affected these products.
When the Altair originally succeeded companies such as Proc Tech reverse engineered the bus and made add on boards. MITS called these companies "parasites" but ther were actually adding value to the product and helped it succeed.
When the IBM PC came out it was pretty much open apart from the BIOS. Even before Compaq reversed engineered it there were heaps of 3rd party add-ons that make the product more attractive to buyers.
Contrast that to the Mac which was closed in every regard, you had virtually one source for add-on's, Apple. The Mac was at a severe disadvantage even before the PC Clone market go going because there were so many people creating extra value for PC's.
Companies hate reverse engineering because they have delusiuons of grandure. They believe that they will be able to predict every possible use for their product AND be able to supply the demand for those products.
The long term fortunes of businesses that take the "reverse-engineering-bad" mentality follows a pretty similar path.
I take it that you've never worked for a company that failed to create brand recognition.
I work for one now and let me tell you it sucks!
You work your guts out to see competitors with inferior products kill you in the market, you tell people what industry you work in and they say "oh, I didn't know company X did that", but most of all it sends moral to the shit and good people leave.
I'm glad Redhat understands the need for branding, if nothing else it means the distro I'm using now IS going to be around in 5 years (and despite the opinion on/. it is a fine distro).
Having the the technical goods is the start of the process, not the end.
Anyone remember that spoof of the Matrix that we all loved?
Well the site had to move a few times because it could't handle the traffic. The creator also ended up getting ripped off by a banner ad company that didn't belive the traffic was real.
Wben something becomes succesfull online these days, it almost always collapses under it's own weight unless lots of $$$ come in to prop it up.
Mojo nation (and other distributed system) are hopefully going to ensure that people can afford to publish rich (bandwidth eating) content and are going to get compensated for the effort.
I really hope this takes off.
When it absolutely, positively, has to be there...
Here in.au we started digital free to air broadcasts on 01.01.01 and this got me thinking, has any spectrum been reserved for community use?
A community access DVB (Digital Video Broadcasting) could potentialy solve many problems with a public wireless internet. It provides MPEG-2 packets for community tv channels, mp3 packets for community radio, auxilary data packets for community internet and a CAS (content authorisation system) for privacy.
Right now setting up for DVB is obscenely expensive (the ammount of money my employer is shelling out is just plain scary) but this will come down, the fact that DVB is an open standard means that it can be implemented with free software on commodity hardware (Moores Law). linuxtv.org has resources on DVB with linux.
The only major problem I can see is transmission, as this will require real infastructure that can't be done with software on cheap commodity hardware. It could be done however, if gov't required existing broadcasters to share their transmitters. SBS shares ABC's transmitter in Sydney for analogue broadcasts, though I don't know if it can actually be done with digital tv (I'm not an RF type person, anyone care to comment?).
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I'm a redhat user and below is my account of a forway with another distribution.
I started dicking around with redhat 5.2 and from 6.0 used it as my sole desktop, before that I'd had a small ammount of experience with Xenix and QNX, (not system administrator, just a normal user).
About a week ago I set up an apache/php/postgresql server for my department on company intranet. The distribution I used was debian powerpc.
From what I'd heard I was expecting a pretty rough ride, "redhat is for newbies", "debian is for the experienced", "redhat is making thier distro incomapitible..." etc.
I've got the say the differences I found were minor! All I needed was a bit of "find / -name... " to see where debian puts things and SMALL ammount of RTFM for the rest. This was all done on the command line and I've got to say that anyone who can't handle the differences is probably in the wrong proffession!
28 years of operation, that is simply increadible!
I can't help but wonder if today's "Cheaper Better Faster" projects will last beyond their specs. Pioneer 10 like so much science before it has provided benifits that the originators never would have forseen.
To the engineers and scientists that built it, I take my hat of too you.
I don't believe that a highly visible brand means that one company will rule the market. Take the Mac when it was first released, amazingly strong brand (Apple), huge marketing blitz (superbowl ads etc.) but after the initial buz it failed in the market because it was an inferior product (single floppy, no harddrive, not enough ram etc). It wasn't untill they fixed these things that the Mac took off, no ammount of marketing make up for the a product.
When the Altair originally succeeded companies such as Proc Tech reverse engineered the bus and made add on boards. MITS called these companies "parasites" but ther were actually adding value to the product and helped it succeed.
When the IBM PC came out it was pretty much open apart from the BIOS. Even before Compaq reversed engineered it there were heaps of 3rd party add-ons that make the product more attractive to buyers.
Contrast that to the Mac which was closed in every regard, you had virtually one source for add-on's, Apple. The Mac was at a severe disadvantage even before the PC Clone market go going because there were so many people creating extra value for PC's.
Companies hate reverse engineering because they have delusiuons of grandure. They believe that they will be able to predict every possible use for their product AND be able to supply the demand for those products.
The long term fortunes of businesses that take the "reverse-engineering-bad" mentality follows a pretty similar path.
I work for one now and let me tell you it sucks!
You work your guts out to see competitors with inferior products kill you in the market, you tell people what industry you work in and they say "oh, I didn't know company X did that", but most of all it sends moral to the shit and good people leave.
I'm glad Redhat understands the need for branding, if nothing else it means the distro I'm using now IS going to be around in 5 years (and despite the opinion on /. it is a fine distro).
Having the the technical goods is the start of the process, not the end.
Cheers
Well the site had to move a few times because it could't handle the traffic. The creator also ended up getting ripped off by a banner ad company that didn't belive the traffic was real.
Wben something becomes succesfull online these days, it almost always collapses under it's own weight unless lots of $$$ come in to prop it up.
Mojo nation (and other distributed system) are hopefully going to ensure that people can afford to publish rich (bandwidth eating) content and are going to get compensated for the effort.
I really hope this takes off.
When it absolutely, positively, has to be there...
A community access DVB (Digital Video Broadcasting) could potentialy solve many problems with a public wireless internet. It provides MPEG-2 packets for community tv channels, mp3 packets for community radio, auxilary data packets for community internet and a CAS (content authorisation system) for privacy.
Right now setting up for DVB is obscenely expensive (the ammount of money my employer is shelling out is just plain scary) but this will come down, the fact that DVB is an open standard means that it can be implemented with free software on commodity hardware (Moores Law). linuxtv.org has resources on DVB with linux.
The only major problem I can see is transmission, as this will require real infastructure that can't be done with software on cheap commodity hardware. It could be done however, if gov't required existing broadcasters to share their transmitters. SBS shares ABC's transmitter in Sydney for analogue broadcasts, though I don't know if it can actually be done with digital tv (I'm not an RF type person, anyone care to comment?).
Just some stuff I've been thinking about lately.