I voted for the most malicious and draconian punishment of all because they didn't list my favorites.
1: All prices on dominant products must be subject to volume discounts only. I.e. The company that buys 100,000 copies cannot pay less than the company that buys 200,000 regardless of other arrangements.
2 : Limit the right of MS to terminate windows licenses. I.e. They can tell you to stop printing Windows CDs, manuals and Hard drives ( what the big goys do ). They should only be allowed to do that for delinquent customers. ( Just like the power companies and phone companies of today ).
Man through scientific endeavor and whatnot gets to the point where he considers himself god and gives up atheistic notions. The council of scientists select a member to address God. The man goes an declares that he is now a god as are all his colleagues and as such they have no further need for God.
God challenges the man to prove his godhood and the man says OK, Let's have a man making contest, just like the old days. God agrees and bends down to gather some mud. The man dose likewise and god snaps at him.
"Go create your own clay."
Moral ? : There is a lot more to God than just the big things wich are obvius.
Man through scientific endeavor and whatnot gets to the point where he considers himself god and gives up atheistic notions. The council of scientists select a member to address God. The man goes an declares that he is now a god as are all his colleagues and as such they have no further need for God.
God challenges the man to prove his godhood and the man says OK, Let's have a man making contest, just like the old days. God agrees and bends down to gather some mud. The man dose likewise and god snaps at him.
"Go create your own clay."
Moral ? : There is a lot more to God than just the big things wich are obvius.
Could MS sue if a breakup sent MSFT down 90% or so.
Can the government go for something novel like volume only pricing. The company who buys 300,000 copies of Windows cannot pay more than the one who buys 200,000 regardless of other arrangements. coupled with a denial of the right to kill a contract at it's own discretion. Something similar applies for public utilities already.
Here is my list of companies RedHat shouldn't buy ( not buying anybody isn't an option when you are overvalued as they are ).
1 : VA. Stay out of the Linux on iNTEL hardware business. More money in working with people who do that. Don't want RedHat Linux to go the way of OS/2 now:).
2 : LinuxCare. Partner with Linux support companies don't buy them.
3 : SCO. Very tempting, but repeat after me. "A culture clash will make all the good programers quit".
4 : Troll Tech. This is an eggshell and we don't want it broken. Let them do QT under the QPL at there own pace.
Now my list of companies to buy.
1. Corel. Go for it, they make closed software that should stay closed so buy them up and keep a hands off approach; "It's not us it's the "Corel Division'". Best of all they are grossly undervalued.
2. Borland/Imprise. MS got to be what it is buy building the best dev tools and practically giving them away at crucial stages. You could force them heavily into Linux.
3. ISPs. Buy as many as you can get. You need to keep the cash streams pumping without disturbing the core business.
4. SGI. Another money stream just waiting to be taped. Eat them up but don't try to manage them.
The problem wasn't with Linux's SMP support ( although Mindcraft would like people to think that ). This was a test of Network horsepower in both the single an quad CPU tests you had to pump lots of static data out to a pretty decent PC clients.
Linux got whooped on because it's Kernel has a single threaded TCP/IP stack and single threaded Ethernet drivers. In other words with 4 NICs in the machine it wasn't getting 4x the data throughput because it was addressing them 1 at a time. This is what I got from the SaMBa people ( ask them about SaMBa on Irix in that kind of configuration ).
The good news is that the relevant subsections have been completely rewritten for Kernel 2.3/2.4 and informal benchmarks show massive speedups ( I have herd _unconfirmed_ rumors of 3x and more in _this_ configuration ).
A test of SMP performance would be database work so head on over to SAP where they can tell you about Linux and NT getting essentially the same performances running R3 on 4 and 8 CPU boxes. Note the 4 CPU tests were with 1Gig vs 4 Gig for NT and Linux. Linux didn't support large memory at the time but the 2.3.25 Kernel dose. Up to 64 Gigs on x86.
Performance is something that can be bought with time and tweaking of Code. MS claimed NT was a Unix killer and started to tweak it for this kind of work from the beginning. Linux was designed as a desktop / small server OS so it's only since these benchmarks that people even noticed these shortfalls. They are being worked on. It takes time. Let the hackers do their thing.
In the mean time head on over to ftp.kernel.org if you are an admin in a place with a large pool of boxes and grab the development kernel. Install it on a bigassed server, take precautions to protect data and benchmark it. grab as much debugging info as you can and talk to Andrea, Alan and the rest. They will tell you what they need tested today, but only if you ask.
I have always been a big fan of Ray Bradbory stuff. he helped me get through the worst part of the teen years. When you're 6'2", 125LBs and really clumsy it really helps to have a reason to sit down and read a good book. Ray bradbory wrote most of those.
So thanks for some good years and hurry up with that recovery. At least this fan is waiting anxiously.
Try this. Take your car to a dozen mechanics. The ones who don't want to let on how they work or what's really going on are usually the least competent and live in constant fear of being replaced by a brighter youngster.
Sounds to me like these Professors have the same problem. I am taking bets as to weather there is a single nobel prize winner in the lot.
An OS is whatever a vendor packages and calls an OS. This question only came up because MS went to court and claimed the charge was about deciding what an OS was.
Rather it's about what a reseller is allowed to do with your OS. I can buy Pepsi in plastic bottles by the case and sell it in paper cups and keep the plastic for my own sic fetish. Pepsi would never even blink.
MS on the other hand told OEMs to install the Browser at a time when it was an optional component. Optional means that people who don't go online ( they exist, honest ) or use Netscape could leave the MSIE CD in it's own little plastic wrapper.
Yes it's part of the OS. No you don't have to install it. Next some Linux distributor is going to tell VAReserch that they _must_ install sound support ( Part of the Kernel for you minimalists ).
Not only that but he used all of 3 diferent prononciations in a single speach.
Try this. Pick a dozen "I'm a cluless reporter who have discoverd Linux" articles and read them. Consistently the least cluefull of them start of by explaining how to pronounce it:).
This is so cool. Imagine being able to mangle everything said to you by any foreigner, live and direct. No hunting through the dictionary, no browsing a web site just straightforward...
"I was pissing by the door and I heard a strange nuzze".
The fact is that regardless of weather this makes Linux a "communist OS" or any other such crap is irrelevant. Microsoft wanted this. IBM Wanted this. Sun, Apple and everyone else who makes any kind of OS wanted this.
They wanted it so badly that MS was flying senior executives over to china to sip tea with government officials.
They wanted it because for MS or any other per seat licensing OS vendor this means a massive amount of cash inflow. China is the only place in the world where a single committee can decide to spend a few billion dollars on MS Windows and Office and put a 50% boost on Billy's earnings. Yes that means 100,000,000 desktops but China will have that eventually.
Having them go with Linux hurts all those vendors badly. As for Linux's part in all this, the chinese government actually doesn't have any provisions for Patents and Copyrights are only of limited value there. They can and probably will set up a "contribute to open source" institute.
The chinese government wields enormous power. They can legislate Mandatory Abortions. If they say Windows is a second class OS... That is law for 1/5 of Earth.
Just when it seams ever big company was going to spend a lot of money coming up with a new ass backwards license that will cause every OSS developer to look elsware up pops HP to say.
"We are too lazy to write a new license and too cheep to pay our lawyers to trash it out with the powers that be".
It's like this really cool game of leapfrog where everyone is trying to see how much they can get the Linux community to be on his side. HP is edging towards the lead with this.
Now there is a joke for you. The upper limit is around $30K for for the IT Manager at a mid sized company ( 50 to 200 employees ).
Cost of living is higher than in the US since everything costs more. Most things have draconian import duty ( charged on retail value ). fortunately Computer stuff is exempt from import duty so you can save a bundle by buying off EBay etc...
If you like nice even, warm weather and you should come here though.
While RedHat isn't profitable it's market cap is huge.
This means that it has the power to buy up larger more profitable companies using only stock. One reason to do so is to get Cash, employees and salable products. Cygnus has all 3 in abundance.
RedHat's Market cap is at around $7 Billion now. It has nothing resembling prospects of earning that kind of money any time soon so the logical thing to do is buy up some other companies that make a lot of money but have small or none existent market caps.
The greatest barrier is that a clash of cultures is dangerous and buying up something that's practically dead is almost suicidal.
In other words, Corel is risky. SCO is bad. Cignus is good. Linuxcare would do wonders for RedHat's reputation:). Turbo Linux is good.
It has always been the case that Sun made boxes that started just below the iNTEL peak and went up substantially from there. The question Sun needs to answer is "why dose IA32 have more apps running on it than all the other platforms ?".
It's about price and openness and when Sun starts letting other people in atr all levels of it's market it can start increase that apps support gap. I.e. License the motherboard and bus architecture, rent out the chip masks, Open the complete API ( SCSL isn't OSS but it dose this ).
In short realize that iNTEL's success has more to do with the likes of VIA, AMD and Compaq than it dose with Microsoft. Cause it sure aint about performance. Sun already has some segments of the high performance corporate market sewn up. Just ask Oracle.
It has always been the case that Sun made boxes that started just below the iNTEL peak and went up substantially from there. The question Sun needs to answer is "why dose IA32 have more apps running on it than all the other platforms ?". It's about price and openness and when Sun starts letting other people in atr all levels of it's market it can start increase that apps support gap. I.e. License the motherboard and bus architecture, rent out the chip masks, Open the complete API ( SCSL isn't OSS but it dose this ). In short realize that iNTEL's success has more to do with the likes of VIA, AMD and Compaq than it dose with Microsoft. Cause it sure aint about performance. Sun already has some segments of the high performance corporate market sewn up. Just ask Oracle.
Getting Office released for Linux isn't in the same league. If Office for Linux is our "main" Office suite then we are in the same position Apple has been forced into. I.e. MS can pretty much kill Apple in everything but it's graphics niche whenever it wants.
Being able to read the formats in a _seperate_ free app is what will help. Make *.doc a commodity and MS can join the XML bandwagon and play our game ( open Standards ). They haven't managed to win the web server war yet so they are wary of truly open standards.
PS : Has MS EVER ported ANYTHING to an OS which can be instaled on a machine that also runs Windows ?
Before you all start blabbering about why this or that doesn't really matter and how software freedom means being able to choose the best application / platform for each Job. Here is how it works in real life.
You cannot run an Office without at least a Windows machine for simply reading MSWord docs being sent to you by "Early deployment partners" and other miscellaneous offices that have standardized on "MS Office". As is home users and servers can get around the problem by not doing business with any of those people.
If the same kind of dominance is brought to bear on web standards then the only desktop useable for browsing will be MSIE on Windows 2000/98. Once MS has the browsing client sewn up then it will be trivial to make that client incompatible with all servers but IE on Win2K.
that scenario means that all you ISPs ( I know a lot of you read Slashdot ) will have to take down whatever server you like and currently use and install Win2K with it's "browser access licenses" and whatever limitations it may have for your specific application.
So yes. The browser client is critical, simply for keeping the ground we already have and keeping the web and open platform where some sun starved geek can write a server that actually works without paying licenses for applicable patents/copyrights.
The MS Office suite filters are the next target but a secondary one since that will be to win ground that already belongs to a proprietary format. It's called leverage and we must get and use it because the other goy ( MS for now, Novel, SCO or AOL latter ) will not accept slicing up the market between "equal players" as any kind of option. They each want it all.
Doing 3 releases ( original + 2 Sequels ) Back to Back should keep me happy for a few months. Here is hoping they find a way to redo some of those killer effects ( Wall running, bullet dodging etc... ) that isn't the least bit Tacky.
Linux, FreeBSD and Solaris are very similar ( relative to other Unixes ) so it takes very little effort to port from one to the other. As such all that was keeping Applix off FreeBSD was the lack of a market. After all Applix is already on the other two.
Now it appears there are a significant number of people with FreeBSD on the desktop, so...
It's also worth noting that FreeBSD generally comes with KDE so this is another nail in the coffin of the "It's too hard" daemon.
This is partially the result of how the US prices lawsuit awards. I.e. The Judge decides how much you deserve to suffer for committing a particular act, then they charge a some that will cause that.
I.e. Loss of life requires shedding of tears and sleepless nights so they will send you to the edge of bankruptcy.
Slashdot Mirror
I voted for the most malicious and draconian punishment of all because they didn't list my favorites.
1: All prices on dominant products must be subject to volume discounts only. I.e. The company that buys 100,000 copies cannot pay less than the company that buys 200,000 regardless of other arrangements.
2 : Limit the right of MS to terminate windows licenses. I.e. They can tell you to stop printing Windows CDs, manuals and Hard drives ( what the big goys do ). They should only be allowed to do that for delinquent customers. ( Just like the power companies and phone companies of today ).
Man through scientific endeavor and whatnot gets to the point where he considers himself god and gives up atheistic notions. The council of scientists select a member to address God. The man goes an declares that he is now a god as are all his colleagues and as such they have no further need for God.
God challenges the man to prove his godhood and the man says OK, Let's have a man making contest, just like the old days. God agrees and bends down to gather some mud. The man dose likewise and god snaps at him.
"Go create your own clay."
Moral ? : There is a lot more to God than just the big things wich are obvius.
Man through scientific endeavor and whatnot gets to the point where he considers himself god and gives up atheistic notions. The council of scientists select a member to address God. The man goes an declares that he is now a god as are all his colleagues and as such they have no further need for God.
God challenges the man to prove his godhood and the man says OK, Let's have a man making contest, just like the old days. God agrees and bends down to gather some mud. The man dose likewise and god snaps at him.
"Go create your own clay."
Moral ? : There is a lot more to God than just the big things wich are obvius.
two questions.
Could MS sue if a breakup sent MSFT down 90% or so.
Can the government go for something novel like volume only pricing. The company who buys 300,000 copies of Windows cannot pay more than the one who buys 200,000 regardless of other arrangements. coupled with a denial of the right to kill a contract at it's own discretion. Something similar applies for public utilities already.
Here is my list of companies RedHat shouldn't buy ( not buying anybody isn't an option when you are overvalued as they are ).
:).
1 : VA. Stay out of the Linux on iNTEL hardware business. More money in working with people who do that. Don't want RedHat Linux to go the way of OS/2 now
2 : LinuxCare. Partner with Linux support companies don't buy them.
3 : SCO. Very tempting, but repeat after me. "A culture clash will make all the good programers quit".
4 : Troll Tech. This is an eggshell and we don't want it broken. Let them do QT under the QPL at there own pace.
Now my list of companies to buy.
1. Corel. Go for it, they make closed software that should stay closed so buy them up and keep a hands off approach; "It's not us it's the "Corel Division'". Best of all they are grossly undervalued.
2. Borland/Imprise. MS got to be what it is buy building the best dev tools and practically giving them away at crucial stages. You could force them heavily into Linux.
3. ISPs. Buy as many as you can get. You need to keep the cash streams pumping without disturbing the core business.
4. SGI. Another money stream just waiting to be taped. Eat them up but don't try to manage them.
The problem wasn't with Linux's SMP support ( although Mindcraft would like people to think that ). This was a test of Network horsepower in both the single an quad CPU tests you had to pump lots of static data out to a pretty decent PC clients.
Linux got whooped on because it's Kernel has a single threaded TCP/IP stack and single threaded Ethernet drivers. In other words with 4 NICs in the machine it wasn't getting 4x the data throughput because it was addressing them 1 at a time. This is what I got from the SaMBa people ( ask them about SaMBa on Irix in that kind of configuration ).
The good news is that the relevant subsections have been completely rewritten for Kernel 2.3/2.4 and informal benchmarks show massive speedups ( I have herd _unconfirmed_ rumors of 3x and more in _this_ configuration ).
A test of SMP performance would be database work so head on over to SAP where they can tell you about Linux and NT getting essentially the same performances running R3 on 4 and 8 CPU boxes. Note the 4 CPU tests were with 1Gig vs 4 Gig for NT and Linux. Linux didn't support large memory at the time but the 2.3.25 Kernel dose. Up to 64 Gigs on x86.
Performance is something that can be bought with time and tweaking of Code. MS claimed NT was a Unix killer and started to tweak it for this kind of work from the beginning. Linux was designed as a desktop / small server OS so it's only since these benchmarks that people even noticed these shortfalls. They are being worked on. It takes time. Let the hackers do their thing.
In the mean time head on over to ftp.kernel.org if you are an admin in a place with a large pool of boxes and grab the development kernel. Install it on a bigassed server, take precautions to protect data and benchmark it. grab as much debugging info as you can and talk to Andrea, Alan and the rest. They will tell you what they need tested today, but only if you ask.
to the family and Mr. Bradbory.
I have always been a big fan of Ray Bradbory stuff. he helped me get through the worst part of the teen years. When you're 6'2", 125LBs and really clumsy it really helps to have a reason to sit down and read a good book. Ray bradbory wrote most of those.
So thanks for some good years and hurry up with that recovery. At least this fan is waiting anxiously.
I asked if they ment daemons :)
Try this. Take your car to a dozen mechanics. The ones who don't want to let on how they work or what's really going on are usually the least competent and live in constant fear of being replaced by a brighter youngster.
Sounds to me like these Professors have the same problem. I am taking bets as to weather there is a single nobel prize winner in the lot.
An OS is whatever a vendor packages and calls an OS. This question only came up because MS went to court and claimed the charge was about deciding what an OS was.
Rather it's about what a reseller is allowed to do with your OS. I can buy Pepsi in plastic bottles by the case and sell it in paper cups and keep the plastic for my own sic fetish. Pepsi would never even blink.
MS on the other hand told OEMs to install the Browser at a time when it was an optional component. Optional means that people who don't go online ( they exist, honest ) or use Netscape could leave the MSIE CD in it's own little plastic wrapper.
Yes it's part of the OS. No you don't have to install it. Next some Linux distributor is going to tell VAReserch that they _must_ install sound support ( Part of the Kernel for you minimalists ).
Not only that but he used all of 3 diferent prononciations in a single speach.
:).
Try this. Pick a dozen "I'm a cluless reporter who have discoverd Linux" articles and read them. Consistently the least cluefull of them start of by explaining how to pronounce it
This is so cool. Imagine being able to mangle everything said to you by any foreigner, live and direct. No hunting through the dictionary, no browsing a web site just straightforward ...
"I was pissing by the door and I heard a strange nuzze".
( Alo Alo for the humor impaird )
The fact is that regardless of weather this makes Linux a "communist OS" or any other such crap is irrelevant. Microsoft wanted this. IBM Wanted this. Sun, Apple and everyone else who makes any kind of OS wanted this.
They wanted it so badly that MS was flying senior executives over to china to sip tea with government officials.
They wanted it because for MS or any other per seat licensing OS vendor this means a massive amount of cash inflow. China is the only place in the world where a single committee can decide to spend a few billion dollars on MS Windows and Office and put a 50% boost on Billy's earnings. Yes that means 100,000,000 desktops but China will have that eventually.
Having them go with Linux hurts all those vendors badly. As for Linux's part in all this, the chinese government actually doesn't have any provisions for Patents and Copyrights are only of limited value there. They can and probably will set up a "contribute to open source" institute.
The chinese government wields enormous power. They can legislate Mandatory Abortions. If they say Windows is a second class OS... That is law for 1/5 of Earth.
Just when it seams ever big company was going to spend a lot of money coming up with a new ass backwards license that will cause every OSS developer to look elsware up pops HP to say.
"We are too lazy to write a new license and too cheep to pay our lawyers to trash it out with the powers that be".
It's like this really cool game of leapfrog where everyone is trying to see how much they can get the Linux community to be on his side. HP is edging towards the lead with this.
Now there is a joke for you. The upper limit is around $30K for for the IT Manager at a mid sized company ( 50 to 200 employees ).
Cost of living is higher than in the US since everything costs more. Most things have draconian import duty ( charged on retail value ). fortunately Computer stuff is exempt from import duty so you can save a bundle by buying off EBay etc...
If you like nice even, warm weather and you should come here though.
While RedHat isn't profitable it's market cap is huge.
This means that it has the power to buy up larger more profitable companies using only stock. One reason to do so is to get Cash, employees and salable products. Cygnus has all 3 in abundance.
RedHat's Market cap is at around $7 Billion now. It has nothing resembling prospects of earning that kind of money any time soon so the logical thing to do is buy up some other companies that make a lot of money but have small or none existent market caps.
:). Turbo Linux is good.
The greatest barrier is that a clash of cultures is dangerous and buying up something that's practically dead is almost suicidal.
In other words, Corel is risky. SCO is bad. Cignus is good. Linuxcare would do wonders for RedHat's reputation
It has always been the case that Sun made boxes that started just below the iNTEL peak and went
up substantially from there. The question Sun needs to answer is "why dose IA32 have more apps
running on it than all the other platforms ?".
It's about price and openness and when Sun starts letting other people in atr all levels of it's market it
can start increase that apps support gap. I.e. License the motherboard and bus architecture, rent out
the chip masks, Open the complete API ( SCSL isn't OSS but it dose this ).
In short realize that iNTEL's success has more to do with the likes of VIA, AMD and Compaq than
it dose with Microsoft. Cause it sure aint about performance. Sun already has some segments of
the high performance corporate market sewn up. Just ask Oracle.
It has always been the case that Sun made boxes that started just below the iNTEL peak and went up substantially from there. The question Sun needs to answer is "why dose IA32 have more apps running on it than all the other platforms ?". It's about price and openness and when Sun starts letting other people in atr all levels of it's market it can start increase that apps support gap. I.e. License the motherboard and bus architecture, rent out the chip masks, Open the complete API ( SCSL isn't OSS but it dose this ). In short realize that iNTEL's success has more to do with the likes of VIA, AMD and Compaq than it dose with Microsoft. Cause it sure aint about performance. Sun already has some segments of the high performance corporate market sewn up. Just ask Oracle.
Back when Linux didn't have a decent presentation
package, Linus T wold do his presentations about
Linux useing MS Powerpoint.
The moral ? Everything has it's purpose ( except
NT Server ).
Getting Office released for Linux isn't in the same league. If Office for Linux is our "main" Office suite then we are in the same position Apple has been forced into. I.e. MS can pretty much kill Apple in everything but it's graphics niche whenever it wants.
Being able to read the formats in a _seperate_ free app is what will help. Make *.doc a commodity and MS can join the XML bandwagon and play our game ( open Standards ). They haven't managed to win the web server war yet so they are wary of truly open standards.
PS : Has MS EVER ported ANYTHING to an OS which can be instaled on a machine that also runs Windows ?
Before you all start blabbering about why this or that doesn't really matter and how software freedom means being able to choose the best application / platform for each Job. Here is how it works in real life.
You cannot run an Office without at least a Windows machine for simply reading MSWord docs being sent to you by "Early deployment partners" and other miscellaneous offices that have standardized on "MS Office". As is home users and servers can get around the problem by not doing business with any of those people.
If the same kind of dominance is brought to bear on web standards then the only desktop useable for browsing will be MSIE on Windows 2000/98. Once MS has the browsing client sewn up then it will be trivial to make that client incompatible with all servers but IE on Win2K.
that scenario means that all you ISPs ( I know a lot of you read Slashdot ) will have to take down whatever server you like and currently use and install Win2K with it's "browser access licenses" and whatever limitations it may have for your specific application.
So yes. The browser client is critical, simply for keeping the ground we already have and keeping the web and open platform where some sun starved geek can write a server that actually works without paying licenses for applicable patents/copyrights.
The MS Office suite filters are the next target but a secondary one since that will be to win ground that already belongs to a proprietary format. It's called leverage and we must get and use it because the other goy ( MS for now, Novel, SCO or AOL latter ) will not accept slicing up the market between "equal players" as any kind of option. They each want it all.
Doing 3 releases ( original + 2 Sequels ) Back to Back should keep me happy for a few months. Here is hoping they find a way to redo some of those killer effects ( Wall running, bullet dodging etc... ) that isn't the least bit Tacky.
Linux, FreeBSD and Solaris are very similar ( relative to other Unixes ) so it takes very little effort to port from one to the other. As such all that was keeping Applix off FreeBSD was the lack of a market. After all Applix is already on the other two.
Now it appears there are a significant number of people with FreeBSD on the desktop, so...
It's also worth noting that FreeBSD generally comes with KDE so this is another nail in the coffin of the "It's too hard" daemon.
This is partially the result of how the US prices lawsuit awards. I.e. The Judge decides how much you deserve to suffer for committing a particular act, then they charge a some that will cause that.
I.e. Loss of life requires shedding of tears and sleepless nights so they will send you to the edge of bankruptcy.