1. Free content has been available on the web since day one, so there is the expectation that it will continue.
2. I can get trade journals and other hardcopy content for free, so why should the web be any different? With so much free content online, why go looking to pay?
3. Most of the content authors are not getting paid, and we all know it.
4. I don't pay for Banner ads. On free sites, I tolerate them as part of the cost of doing business. As soon as I spend dollar number one, those ads have to go away.
5. Product quality - Just because I visit Slashdot, there is no guarantee that I will find something useful every time. As a freebie, I lose nothing by visiting.
6. The "e-business relationship". If I provide enough information to pay, it just leads to spam, telemarketing, and fraud.
7. Hidden, nuisance fees. The prosecution presents:
exhibit A: cell phone bills
exhibit B: cable bills
exhibit C: DSL bills
exhibit D: long-distance bills
Because of the systematic billing fraud that is so common these days, my reaction is to avoid subscribing or agreeing to pay for anything unless I really, really want the product or service.
I have attended classes where I would have learned just as much on my own from a book. In such cases, the instructor is usually reading material to the class, and often lacks the real-world experience to go beyond what is printed. At that point, the entire value of attending the class is that I had no telephone, beeper, e-mail, or visitors to deal with. There are cheaper ways to accomplish this, but when was the last time you stayed home and read a book in lieu of going to work?
I have also attended classes where the instructor was really sharp, and went well beyond the printed material. This is what you hope for in training, but it only happens about a third of the time.
In defense of traditional training, I think some topics require a "hands-on" workshop approach, in which case the "give-me-a-book-and-leave-me-alone" approach won't work. Remember too, that some people learn best in a classroom/lecture environment, while others prefer to read manuals, and some need to be "hands on".
None of the training options work at all unless the knowledge is used and reinforced immediately after the training is finished.
I watched Larry Ellison's keynote speech at the Oracle 9i product launch. He goes on and on for 40+ minutes about clusters, the benefits of having them, the fallacies of "shared-nothing" clusters, all the stuff we both know. It was painful to hear him talk about clusters as if they were invented for IBM mainframes (Ha!). In any event, he NEVER mentioned Tru64, and mentioned Compaq ONLY in the context of low-end Intel boxes. If ever there was a tailor-made opportunity to talk about Tru64 as a choice platform for Oracle Parallel Server, this was it. Check it out at http://www.oracle.com/features/9i/index.html?9ilau nch.html
I could be wrong. There might be a ton of Oracle support for Tru64, but as an Oracle customer, I sure don't see it. At my current job, we just started to create an Oracle environment. I asked the pre-sales tech. support for their recommendation on platform, since we had to buy all the hardware anyway (and I was already unhappy with Windows NT/2000). They pushed Solaris and Windows 2000 (in that order). Tru64 was never mentioned. Not wanting to re-experience the orphan support level as in their VMS offering, I was only too happy to pick Solaris. If I told them I already had a Tru64 server and was considering buying their database for it, I'm sure they would have told me how good their Tru64 product support is (and maybe it really is).
Alpha may be a better chip than Itanium or SPARC II. Tru64 may be a better OS than Solaris or Linux. But at the end of the day, Oracle is making the sale for SPARC II/Solaris. Press release or no press release, it remains to be seen if Oracle intends to support Tru64 the same way they support Solaris.
I've been out of the DEC (oops, I meant Digital) business for a few years, I apologize for my lack of current marketing buzzwords. I worked on VMS clusters back in the 80's & 90's. It was great technology then as well as today.
Even so, I wonder how you think "TruCluster will have moved on even farther", when the Alpha it runs on is gone. Who is going to "move it farther"? Compaq? Intel? Compaq will be lucky to get it ported, much less enhanced. Remember, they will have to support Alpha through at least 2004. If Compaq takes too long, we might just see marketing hype like "Red Hat has it now".
It's not all that hard to prove that Digital had great technology. After all, Intel would rather buy & bury the Alpha rather than compete with it. Having the best chip and cluster technology didn't help Digital or Compaq, which is partially why Intel now owns the Alpha (first the manufacturing plants, now the chip itself).
Some of the managers of today's Tru64 Unix clusters have already migrated from VAX/VMS to Alpha/VMS to Alpha/Unix. Faced with yet another migration, it's going to be awfully tempting to use an OS that runs on just about any CPU.
I think Oracle will be the final determining factor. If Oracle supports Itanium/Tru64 Unix in a big way, then the superior clustering ability actually means something. If they treat it like they did VMS, Linux wins no matter whose cluster is bettter.
There are quite a few large datacenters that once ran VAX/VMS and then migrated to Alpha/VMS. I used to work in one. These places typically run in-house-developed or heavily customized software, none of which is ever going to port cleanly to any version of Windows.
Compaqs liquidation of Alpha means the end of the end for VMS; Digital Unix as well. The shrinking field of CPU competitors means a shrinking field of OS competitors as well. How much will Compaq invest in OS or software development for a processor that Intel is sure to scrap?
Bottom line: Anyone running a Compaq/DEC operating system had better download the appropriate GNU compilers and start converting to Linux. For DEC refugees, Linux is now "the only game in town."
Bill has already eaten the last of the power pellets, and is now running from the "ghosts" of open-source. Sure, he can wander around the maze for a while and perhaps grab an occasional piece of fruit, but the opposition is getting faster by the minute.
Rentware and mandatory registration for XP? Wheeweeweeweew! Gotcha!
When M$ wonders how to increase the percentage of NT and 2K upgrades to XP, this is where they discover that Linux has replaced their OS on lots of machines, making the M$ products "shelfware".
I wonder how many boxes ship with Linux (or a non-M$ OS), and get converted to M$???
Fine. Let's see them flood the stores with SDMI media, along with a 70% price hike (as in your CD example). That would lead back to my original prediction of the SDMI media fighting with DIVX discs for landfill space.
At least the CD offered a longer life and better signal-to-noise ratio. The price of CDs was higher because the early adopters were willing to pay IN ORDER TO GET THE IMPROVED PRODUCT.
The only benefits of SDMI are for the recording industry. I can't thing of any benefits for consumers. SDMI is NOT going to be an easy sell, because (unlike the CD), there is NO INCENTIVE WHATSOEVER for consumers to adopt the technology.
Granted, the industry could take the CD's off the shelves, and wait for consumers to buy subsidized SDMI players. But that would be a financial disaster for the recording industry in the short term. It would be out of character for these people to pursue anything other than short-term profit -- they simply don't have the patience to sit there and suffer until the consumers get tired of listening to all their old music. Most of their CEO's couldn't survive more than 1 quarter of negative growth!
What do you suppose happens to those CEOs when they decide to "bite the bullet" and suffer for a few months while they flood the stores with SDMI crap, only to discover that (a) no one is buying, and (b) it's been hacked by the heroes of DeCSS?
In order to gain consumer acceptance, the industry will have to offer something BETTER or CHEAPER. Until that happens, we all keep our protection-free CD and MP3 players, and we buy only music that is compatible with them. The industry will continue to sell unencrypted CDs because the customers don't have the hardware to play anything else.
Let's get back to "better or cheaper". "Better" is going to be tough because it means expensive hardware upgrades -- replacing your stereo with some kind of 16-channel amplifier and speakers. A tough sell when you consider that we all have only 2 ears, and they are not upgradable.
"Cheaper" is not likely either. The industry could use existing P2P technology to roll out a "cheaper" pay-per-song model, but they chose not to. To these folks, "cheaper" means less profit in the short term.
Even if they could solve the technical problem, the unsold hardware and media would end up at the landfill, right next to the DIVX players and discs.
Crazy laws won't work. P2P networks (with or without Napster) are growing faster than anyone can legislate. Legal tactics work only against centrally controlled networks. Any law that cannot achive voluntary compliance from the majority of citizens is doomed. We simply don't have enough lawyers and courts to prosecute the number of would-be criminals. Remember the national 55 MPH speed limit? Prohibition?
Are they really going to attack P2P networks (legally or otherwise)? Consider the scum-sucking spammers. They're like cockroaches. In theory, killing them is easy. LART one and it's dead. The problem is you can't kill them fast enough to control their growth. There are alot more P2P users than spammers -- both are here to stay.
Granted, the server development projects have been much more successful with Linux than the desktop apps.
However, M$ now has some of the most obnoxious licensing policies in the industry. Given the high cost (and registration hassles) of XP, the incentive to create Linux desktop apps has never been greater. A really slick, better-than-M$ office productivity suite on Linux would be about the only thing most people would cheerfully pay for.
If Linux on the desktop is as dead as you say, then the logical conclusion is that the market will tolerate M$ licensing antics -- I wonder.
Wince DEVICES better, the OS is M$ garbage
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Palm In Trouble?
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I used a Wince device for about 15 minutes before deciding the OS and it's pocket [crippled] apps were hopeless. On the other hand, at least the Wince devices have keyboards.
If you want to do anything other than view calendars that were downloaded from Outlook, you need a keyboard.
Palm devices suck because of the lack of an integrated keyboard. Sure you can add one, but it's clumsy as hell. Wince sucks because M$ has long since lost the ability to deal with limited-resource environments.
I think the most reasonable future for handhelds is to use Linux as a replacement for Wince. Keep the keyboard, delete M$.
The spam advocate appears to be "Rep. Bob Barr, R-Ga."
If he can oppose an anti-spam bill, then he must have some kind of dazzling personal defense mechanism that limits his exposure to spam -- perhaps he would like to share it with the rest of us.
Then again, maybe he just needs a demonstration of the spam problem. Anyone have a folder full of spam? Ready to forward?
It wouldn't be all that hard to forward all of our archived spams to every member of the House and Senate.
No. It's not necessarily a copyright violation, either. It may be simply be "fair use", non-commercial trading of audio, as loosely defined in the Home Audio Recording Act. Granted, it's happening on a grand scale, beyond anything that Congress ever envisoned. Then again, so is the nonsense of DMCA.
I agree. There will be MP3s. They will be shared. If a service can be useful and cost-effective, people might be willing to pay a flat rate.
I have no plan whatsoever to buy any hardware, software, or media that is not MP3-friendly.
Nothing will stop these people from adding encryption to restrict "fair use", but nothing is going to make me buy their product, either.
I propose a law that requires all encrypted CDs to be made on biodegradable media. Since the unsold products are going to be competing with DIVX discs for landfill space, we might as well be proactive.
Granted, the hardware industry has done a little better than than the software industry.
Ethernet, busses in general (ISA, PCI), Video, SCSI & IDE, the list goes on and on. As you state, it's easy to build in a nominal fee when hardware is being produced. After all, no one is going to give away hardware. Notice how the most successful hardware standards have nominal licensing fees, while the companies that fiercely guarded their patents [Digital Equipment] eventually got clobbered.
As far as I know, DHCP has been around far longer than Microsoft's involvement in networking, so I wonder what they might have contributed. The word "Microsoft" does not appear in RFC 1534, 1533, 1497, 1395, or 1084. If they made a contribution, it was after DHCP was well-established. Having said all that, I have to give them some credit for their role in XML and LDAP.
In general, I think the open source model generates better products and more innovation than closed source. If Microsoft wants to prove me wrong by producing the best software in the world (at a reasonable cost), be my guest.
To the extent that open source threatens the profitability of Microsoft, I say they were never "entitled" to profitability in the first place. Besides, they could always redirect their energies to those applications where open source has not been all that effective. Adapting to change is how companies survive.
I've never been to Denmark, but I assume they have musicians. I suspect they lack a recording industry, or perhaps their recording industry is not well-connected politically.
From what I have read, the recording industry gets most of the money from CD distribution; only a handful of artists get meaningful cash. If that's true, and [assuming] most of Denmark's musicians have record deals with labels outside Denmark, then the actual cost [to Denmark] is very low.
It wouldn't be all that hard for Denmark to get tax revenue from foreign services who have a nominal presence in Denmark. The service providers would have to live off of advertising and memberships, just as Napster would like to do. If the whole concept was kept relatively free of greed and stupidity, Denmark could get a tiny percentage of a huge-volume/low-margin business. Their total investment is nothing more than passing a law. Considering the utter futility of the RIAA war on MP3 sharing, maybe Denmark is simply the first to realize that there is money to be made from the mistakes of the US.
Where would we be without the Internet? As I recall, this was one of those taxpayer-funded NSF/Pentagon projects that "went public". It is perhaps the most useful military project of all time. Sounds a whole lot like "open source" to me.
What has the "copyright/patent/intellectual property" world contributed to networking? NETBEUI? Appletalk? IPX? Where are they now? Could the Microsofts of the world ever "innovate" anything like TCP/IP without endless copyright/patent litigation and an IRS-like licensing scheme?
If Microsoft's approach was so great, they would simply ignore open source, much as they ignore Corel. Instead, you see them treating open source like it's a five-alarm fire.
To me, it looks like Microsoft's "respect for intellectual property" begins and ends with THEIR intellectual property, not the intellectual property of others, even though it is the basis for everything Microsoft does.
"Guaranteed" to be around in 10 years???
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MS VP Speech Online
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You mean like Digital Equipment (or what's left of DEC, buried in the Compaq website, or available at backyard tag sales)?
Ten years ago, they would have been one of those "guaranteed to be there companies". Not just as a hardware vendor; they once had a great deal of software too.
As a manager, I view Open Source Software as no more of a risk than the commercially available alternatives.
Not even the people at Psychic Friends Network know for sure who is going to be around in ten years.
Re:The true "cost" to the music industry
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Ring-Tone Royalties
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Agreed -- at most, the loss is what people would have been willing to pay. I doubt that anyone would ever pay anything, unless the cost was somehow buried in the phone itself. It would have to be some trivial amount, like the pennies per unit that tape player manufacturers pay for the "Dolby" logo.
Only the music industry would think there is even a remote possibility of collecting a royalty for each ring! Perhaps they will have some sort of Ringtone Scrambling Scheme (RSS) or Secure Dummy Money Inititive (SDMI) to insure compliance with ringtone royalties. Every call you receive will result in your phone calling the RIAA hotline to update the royalty computers.
Maybe I will register a copyright on the "standard" ring -- that's the most popular of all! Then again, a patent on "Ringtone Technology" sounds interesting.
I supervised a small number of people who were network/operations types in a decent size computer room (serving about 500 remote users at 16 sites). Although it was a government operation, we were all non-union, salaried employees. We were blessed with lots of money for equipment, but not much for people. Over time, the computer room grew until it got to the stage where "everyday something is broken, it's just a matter of diagnosing today's crisis."
Once upon a time, my boss initiated a project to automate the notification process. We spent $60K on software that would activate alphanumeric pagers, based on whatever conditions we chose to monitor. Of course, we got carried away with this new technology, and pagers were going off everytime a printer ran out of paper. We discovered that the pagers were not a substitute for a second shift of operations. Realizing that compensation was now an issue, the boss tried to get money for the people who were expected to answer the pagers. He failed, and the whole thing ended.
Later, a new boss is on the scene. He thought we could simply rotate coverage (as some of the other posters have suggested). Having lived through the old nightmare, I convinced the new boss that the pagers would set off a labor relations crisis. Assigning responsiblity without assigning pay would simply not fly. Plan B was to use comp-time, but that just opened up a new lack-of-coverage problem during the first shift (solution worse than original problem). I asked questions like "What do you plan on doing when certain people have dead-battery-syndrome whenever it's their turn to be the main contact?" When push comes to shove, the HR department will decide that off-hours coverage is NOT really "work", fearing that any other conclusion will trigger retroactive paychecks. Therefore, no one can be disciplined for not working, since we were not paying.
The new boss was not fully convinced, but that changed fast when one of the remote sites asked us to have a person covering the computer room on Saturdays when they did student registration. Then another site asked for Saturday coverage just in case the Internet went down while a class was in session. I asked the new boss "You want to give them Saturday? Fine, just tell me which of the other days you want to delete!"
In general, I had hard-working people who were willing and able to work crazy hours (sometimes uncompensated) just because they knew it was important. Things got out of hand when their goodwill was abused (first by software, later by chronic whiners who caused most of their own problems).
After evaluating lots of non-options, we had essentially two choices: One was to give the pagers to the people without any specific schedule, hoping that at least one person would respond in a crisis. The other was to take away the pagers completely, in the absence of a viable compensation system.
Eventually, we hired another person who worked a staggered shift with the first shift people, on a Tuesday through Saturday basis. Everyone carried a pager, with the understanding that if the evening guy called, it was one of your colleages asking for help. The paging activity dropped to almost nothing, service availability was improved, and we found all kinds of off-peak things for the evening/Saturday person to take care of.
"Wow, you're really insecure and bigoted. In your worldview, all PhDs are underqualified, conceited..." Your first sentence is an opinion, the second is bordering on libel. Who is the troll now???
I really want to ignore your second paragraph, but I just can't. "...Or he/she really is competent and interested in doing a good job instead of covering his ass, (which seems to be your main concern), and he/she probably does deserve to have your job." I could interpret that as meaning you think the Ph.D is entitled to my job, merely by proving they are competent and interested in doing the job I hire them for. Hmmmm.
FYI, my main concern is this: I don't want to invest the time and effort to hire someone if I just end up doing their job for them while they ignore the actual job and pursue some other job they feel entitled to. I'm not especially concerned about a person grabbing my job or becoming my boss, because ignoring the job I hire them for is going to trigger negative evaluations and so forth. Long before that happens, such a person would be confronted with their own job performance, compared line by line with their job description. The real concern is that this entire exercise can be a real time-waster for all parties involved. By the way, a Ph.D is not truly required for this to be a problem, but I saw it happen, twice actually. I was not directly involved in either case, but it was like watching someone else's car accident. It makes you think a little more about your own driving habits.
I don't assume "all PhDs are underqualified, conceited, etc." (although your post might make me reconsider:-)
I do not have a "No Ph.D's allowed policy", but everyone recalls their past experiences when they make decisions. Having said that, each person has to be considered as an individual.
This may come as a shock to you, but the resume screening process consists of reading documents and making assumptions about the people who wrote them. After all, a resume by itself proves nothing! I see certain things, I make certain assumptions. The interview process is where I give people a chance to prove or disprove the assumptions. I am fully prepared for the possibility of a Ph.D applicant who has great answers for my questions and disproves any assumptions I might have. Asking the right questions is how I explore the assumptions. Keeping an open mind and being prepared to abandon one's assumptions is part of the game plan.
One of my best hiring experiences was a person with an MSCS degree. The person did the job I hired them for, earned a promotion, and ultimately went to the pharmaceutical industry for better pay. In the end, it was a mutually beneficial experience. In the world of management, that's as good as it gets.
In my opinion, you are incredibly naieve if you don't think employers make assumptions about Ph.Ds, just as they make assumptions about high school dropouts. In some cases, the Ph.D degree creates the assumption of knowledge and credibility -- that's great. All I'm saying is that not all the Ph.D assumptions are positive. One of the other posts has a little more detail on the concept of not-so-great assumptions about Ph.Ds.
All rhetoric aside, employer assumptions about Ph.Ds demanding a premium salary (or quickly changing jobs in pursuit of it) is probably the biggest obstacle of all.
I liked your list of attitudes. I'll add one more. "Employer wonders if Ph.D applicant really wants the position we are trying to fill."
As a manager, I occasionally see Ph.D applicants for software positions. My fear is that if I hire a Ph.D, they will assume that their degree makes them my boss, instead of the other way around. The person I hire might simply ignore their job and try to do mine instead. If they start to schmooze with senior management (instead of doing the job for which they were hired), they will either (a) convince the top brass that they should be running I.T. or (b) manufacture some other "more challenging" job in the organization for themselves. This leaves me with at best a refill of a vacant position; at worst a total loss, since the person and position might get re-assigned. With an MS degree, this problem is reduced and with a BS it is eliminated.
I have plenty of confidence in my skill and experience, it's just that I once worked in higher education. I saw some wacky behavior from people who thought the Ph.D was a replacement for experience.
As you say, learning the basics is really important. However, everyone has to decide for themselves, just how much education is enough. In the long run, a person's willingness to keep up with technology will determine their career success more than anything that happens in college.
I agree that a well-constructed escrow agreement could minimize the risk, but ONLY if the vendor is willing to rule out the possiblity of selling the product to a third party. Even in the Trolltech scenario, I can imagine some sleazy interpretations that could lead to "sub-contracting", "outsourcing", or "transferring" the "product support" to a third party, along with a coincidental increase in prices, or perhaps degraded service. It still comes back to trusting the vendor to not circumvent the spirit of the escrow agreement. Some companies are inherently untrustworthy, others become that way when their revenue declines and they become desperate.
The core problem is that rentware requires trusting your vendor. The industry in general has had too many trust-related problems that were triggered either by greed or loss of revenue that had to be made up somehow.
I used to work in higher education; we relied almost totally on DEC (aka Digital) products for hardware & software. (For our younger readers, DEC was once one of the most profitable, stable companies in America, along with being the number 2 computer manufacturer.) Back in the 1980's, the concept of DEC going out of business seemed about as likely as an alien invasion from Mars.
DEC gave us free annual licenses for practically every software package they sold (think of it as "rentware" without the "rent"). We had EVERYTHING -- operating systems, databases, applications, languages, tools, you name it. Commercial customers paid big bucks for this software (evidently not big enough).
As DEC began to fall apart, the applications were sold off, piece by piece to third parties. Not only did we lose our "free stuff", some of the new vendors charged high prices for licenses and provided lousy support for products that no longer as tightly integrated as they once were. The commercial customers with perpetual licenses had the option of holding their current versions while they considered their options. We had to quickly find ways to eliminate our dependence on literally dozens of software packages before the licenses expired.
If this could happen to the once-mighty DEC, how much faith do we have in lesser companies? Back in the 1980's, we were all naieve about the stability of corporations, especially the biggies. Not anymore.
Slashdot Mirror
2. I can get trade journals and other hardcopy content for free, so why should the web be any different? With so much free content online, why go looking to pay?
3. Most of the content authors are not getting paid, and we all know it.
4. I don't pay for Banner ads. On free sites, I tolerate them as part of the cost of doing business. As soon as I spend dollar number one, those ads have to go away.
5. Product quality - Just because I visit Slashdot, there is no guarantee that I will find something useful every time. As a freebie, I lose nothing by visiting.
6. The "e-business relationship". If I provide enough information to pay, it just leads to spam, telemarketing, and fraud.
7. Hidden, nuisance fees. The prosecution presents:
Because of the systematic billing fraud that is so common these days, my reaction is to avoid subscribing or agreeing to pay for anything unless I really, really want the product or service.
I have also attended classes where the instructor was really sharp, and went well beyond the printed material. This is what you hope for in training, but it only happens about a third of the time.
In defense of traditional training, I think some topics require a "hands-on" workshop approach, in which case the "give-me-a-book-and-leave-me-alone" approach won't work. Remember too, that some people learn best in a classroom/lecture environment, while others prefer to read manuals, and some need to be "hands on".
None of the training options work at all unless the knowledge is used and reinforced immediately after the training is finished.
I could be wrong. There might be a ton of Oracle support for Tru64, but as an Oracle customer, I sure don't see it. At my current job, we just started to create an Oracle environment. I asked the pre-sales tech. support for their recommendation on platform, since we had to buy all the hardware anyway (and I was already unhappy with Windows NT/2000). They pushed Solaris and Windows 2000 (in that order). Tru64 was never mentioned. Not wanting to re-experience the orphan support level as in their VMS offering, I was only too happy to pick Solaris. If I told them I already had a Tru64 server and was considering buying their database for it, I'm sure they would have told me how good their Tru64 product support is (and maybe it really is).
Alpha may be a better chip than Itanium or SPARC II. Tru64 may be a better OS than Solaris or Linux. But at the end of the day, Oracle is making the sale for SPARC II/Solaris. Press release or no press release, it remains to be seen if Oracle intends to support Tru64 the same way they support Solaris.
Even so, I wonder how you think "TruCluster will have moved on even farther", when the Alpha it runs on is gone. Who is going to "move it farther"? Compaq? Intel? Compaq will be lucky to get it ported, much less enhanced. Remember, they will have to support Alpha through at least 2004. If Compaq takes too long, we might just see marketing hype like "Red Hat has it now".
It's not all that hard to prove that Digital had great technology. After all, Intel would rather buy & bury the Alpha rather than compete with it. Having the best chip and cluster technology didn't help Digital or Compaq, which is partially why Intel now owns the Alpha (first the manufacturing plants, now the chip itself).
Some of the managers of today's Tru64 Unix clusters have already migrated from VAX/VMS to Alpha/VMS to Alpha/Unix. Faced with yet another migration, it's going to be awfully tempting to use an OS that runs on just about any CPU.
I think Oracle will be the final determining factor. If Oracle supports Itanium/Tru64 Unix in a big way, then the superior clustering ability actually means something. If they treat it like they did VMS, Linux wins no matter whose cluster is bettter.
I'll bet the folks at NASA have a few Alphas just waiting for such a conversion.
In the battle of M$ vs. open source, the existance of these high-end sites will certainly help negate the M$ FUD.
Compaqs liquidation of Alpha means the end of the end for VMS; Digital Unix as well. The shrinking field of CPU competitors means a shrinking field of OS competitors as well. How much will Compaq invest in OS or software development for a processor that Intel is sure to scrap?
Bottom line: Anyone running a Compaq/DEC operating system had better download the appropriate GNU compilers and start converting to Linux. For DEC refugees, Linux is now "the only game in town."
Rentware and mandatory registration for XP? Wheeweeweeweew! Gotcha!
I wonder how many boxes ship with Linux (or a non-M$ OS), and get converted to M$???
At least the CD offered a longer life and better signal-to-noise ratio. The price of CDs was higher because the early adopters were willing to pay IN ORDER TO GET THE IMPROVED PRODUCT.
The only benefits of SDMI are for the recording industry. I can't thing of any benefits for consumers. SDMI is NOT going to be an easy sell, because (unlike the CD), there is NO INCENTIVE WHATSOEVER for consumers to adopt the technology.
Granted, the industry could take the CD's off the shelves, and wait for consumers to buy subsidized SDMI players. But that would be a financial disaster for the recording industry in the short term. It would be out of character for these people to pursue anything other than short-term profit -- they simply don't have the patience to sit there and suffer until the consumers get tired of listening to all their old music. Most of their CEO's couldn't survive more than 1 quarter of negative growth!
What do you suppose happens to those CEOs when they decide to "bite the bullet" and suffer for a few months while they flood the stores with SDMI crap, only to discover that (a) no one is buying, and (b) it's been hacked by the heroes of DeCSS?
Let's get back to "better or cheaper". "Better" is going to be tough because it means expensive hardware upgrades -- replacing your stereo with some kind of 16-channel amplifier and speakers. A tough sell when you consider that we all have only 2 ears, and they are not upgradable.
"Cheaper" is not likely either. The industry could use existing P2P technology to roll out a "cheaper" pay-per-song model, but they chose not to. To these folks, "cheaper" means less profit in the short term.
Even if they could solve the technical problem, the unsold hardware and media would end up at the landfill, right next to the DIVX players and discs.
Crazy laws won't work. P2P networks (with or without Napster) are growing faster than anyone can legislate. Legal tactics work only against centrally controlled networks. Any law that cannot achive voluntary compliance from the majority of citizens is doomed. We simply don't have enough lawyers and courts to prosecute the number of would-be criminals. Remember the national 55 MPH speed limit? Prohibition?
Are they really going to attack P2P networks (legally or otherwise)? Consider the scum-sucking spammers. They're like cockroaches. In theory, killing them is easy. LART one and it's dead. The problem is you can't kill them fast enough to control their growth. There are alot more P2P users than spammers -- both are here to stay.
However, M$ now has some of the most obnoxious licensing policies in the industry. Given the high cost (and registration hassles) of XP, the incentive to create Linux desktop apps has never been greater. A really slick, better-than-M$ office productivity suite on Linux would be about the only thing most people would cheerfully pay for.
If Linux on the desktop is as dead as you say, then the logical conclusion is that the market will tolerate M$ licensing antics -- I wonder.
If you want to do anything other than view calendars that were downloaded from Outlook, you need a keyboard.
Palm devices suck because of the lack of an integrated keyboard. Sure you can add one, but it's clumsy as hell. Wince sucks because M$ has long since lost the ability to deal with limited-resource environments.
I think the most reasonable future for handhelds is to use Linux as a replacement for Wince. Keep the keyboard, delete M$.
How about Anne Robinson as a guest host (when Shatner goes on vacation)? "I'll remind the chefs that grease is NOT the theme ingredient!"
If he can oppose an anti-spam bill, then he must have some kind of dazzling personal defense mechanism that limits his exposure to spam -- perhaps he would like to share it with the rest of us.
Then again, maybe he just needs a demonstration of the spam problem. Anyone have a folder full of spam? Ready to forward?
It wouldn't be all that hard to forward all of our archived spams to every member of the House and Senate.
No. It's not necessarily a copyright violation, either. It may be simply be "fair use", non-commercial trading of audio, as loosely defined in the Home Audio Recording Act. Granted, it's happening on a grand scale, beyond anything that Congress ever envisoned. Then again, so is the nonsense of DMCA.
I have no plan whatsoever to buy any hardware, software, or media that is not MP3-friendly.
Nothing will stop these people from adding encryption to restrict "fair use", but nothing is going to make me buy their product, either.
I propose a law that requires all encrypted CDs to be made on biodegradable media. Since the unsold products are going to be competing with DIVX discs for landfill space, we might as well be proactive.
Ethernet, busses in general (ISA, PCI), Video, SCSI & IDE, the list goes on and on. As you state, it's easy to build in a nominal fee when hardware is being produced. After all, no one is going to give away hardware. Notice how the most successful hardware standards have nominal licensing fees, while the companies that fiercely guarded their patents [Digital Equipment] eventually got clobbered.
As far as I know, DHCP has been around far longer than Microsoft's involvement in networking, so I wonder what they might have contributed. The word "Microsoft" does not appear in RFC 1534, 1533, 1497, 1395, or 1084. If they made a contribution, it was after DHCP was well-established. Having said all that, I have to give them some credit for their role in XML and LDAP.
In general, I think the open source model generates better products and more innovation than closed source. If Microsoft wants to prove me wrong by producing the best software in the world (at a reasonable cost), be my guest.
To the extent that open source threatens the profitability of Microsoft, I say they were never "entitled" to profitability in the first place. Besides, they could always redirect their energies to those applications where open source has not been all that effective. Adapting to change is how companies survive.
From what I have read, the recording industry gets most of the money from CD distribution; only a handful of artists get meaningful cash. If that's true, and [assuming] most of Denmark's musicians have record deals with labels outside Denmark, then the actual cost [to Denmark] is very low.
It wouldn't be all that hard for Denmark to get tax revenue from foreign services who have a nominal presence in Denmark. The service providers would have to live off of advertising and memberships, just as Napster would like to do. If the whole concept was kept relatively free of greed and stupidity, Denmark could get a tiny percentage of a huge-volume/low-margin business. Their total investment is nothing more than passing a law. Considering the utter futility of the RIAA war on MP3 sharing, maybe Denmark is simply the first to realize that there is money to be made from the mistakes of the US.
What has the "copyright/patent/intellectual property" world contributed to networking? NETBEUI? Appletalk? IPX? Where are they now? Could the Microsofts of the world ever "innovate" anything like TCP/IP without endless copyright/patent litigation and an IRS-like licensing scheme?
If Microsoft's approach was so great, they would simply ignore open source, much as they ignore Corel. Instead, you see them treating open source like it's a five-alarm fire.
To me, it looks like Microsoft's "respect for intellectual property" begins and ends with THEIR intellectual property, not the intellectual property of others, even though it is the basis for everything Microsoft does.
Ten years ago, they would have been one of those "guaranteed to be there companies". Not just as a hardware vendor; they once had a great deal of software too.
As a manager, I view Open Source Software as no more of a risk than the commercially available alternatives.
Not even the people at Psychic Friends Network know for sure who is going to be around in ten years.
Only the music industry would think there is even a remote possibility of collecting a royalty for each ring! Perhaps they will have some sort of Ringtone Scrambling Scheme (RSS) or Secure Dummy Money Inititive (SDMI) to insure compliance with ringtone royalties. Every call you receive will result in your phone calling the RIAA hotline to update the royalty computers.
Maybe I will register a copyright on the "standard" ring -- that's the most popular of all! Then again, a patent on "Ringtone Technology" sounds interesting.
Once upon a time, my boss initiated a project to automate the notification process. We spent $60K on software that would activate alphanumeric pagers, based on whatever conditions we chose to monitor. Of course, we got carried away with this new technology, and pagers were going off everytime a printer ran out of paper. We discovered that the pagers were not a substitute for a second shift of operations. Realizing that compensation was now an issue, the boss tried to get money for the people who were expected to answer the pagers. He failed, and the whole thing ended.
Later, a new boss is on the scene. He thought we could simply rotate coverage (as some of the other posters have suggested). Having lived through the old nightmare, I convinced the new boss that the pagers would set off a labor relations crisis. Assigning responsiblity without assigning pay would simply not fly. Plan B was to use comp-time, but that just opened up a new lack-of-coverage problem during the first shift (solution worse than original problem). I asked questions like "What do you plan on doing when certain people have dead-battery-syndrome whenever it's their turn to be the main contact?" When push comes to shove, the HR department will decide that off-hours coverage is NOT really "work", fearing that any other conclusion will trigger retroactive paychecks. Therefore, no one can be disciplined for not working, since we were not paying.
The new boss was not fully convinced, but that changed fast when one of the remote sites asked us to have a person covering the computer room on Saturdays when they did student registration. Then another site asked for Saturday coverage just in case the Internet went down while a class was in session. I asked the new boss "You want to give them Saturday? Fine, just tell me which of the other days you want to delete!"
In general, I had hard-working people who were willing and able to work crazy hours (sometimes uncompensated) just because they knew it was important. Things got out of hand when their goodwill was abused (first by software, later by chronic whiners who caused most of their own problems).
After evaluating lots of non-options, we had essentially two choices: One was to give the pagers to the people without any specific schedule, hoping that at least one person would respond in a crisis. The other was to take away the pagers completely, in the absence of a viable compensation system.
Eventually, we hired another person who worked a staggered shift with the first shift people, on a Tuesday through Saturday basis. Everyone carried a pager, with the understanding that if the evening guy called, it was one of your colleages asking for help. The paging activity dropped to almost nothing, service availability was improved, and we found all kinds of off-peak things for the evening/Saturday person to take care of.
I really want to ignore your second paragraph, but I just can't. "...Or he/she really is competent and interested in doing a good job instead of covering his ass, (which seems to be your main concern), and he/she probably does deserve to have your job." I could interpret that as meaning you think the Ph.D is entitled to my job, merely by proving they are competent and interested in doing the job I hire them for. Hmmmm.
FYI, my main concern is this: I don't want to invest the time and effort to hire someone if I just end up doing their job for them while they ignore the actual job and pursue some other job they feel entitled to. I'm not especially concerned about a person grabbing my job or becoming my boss, because ignoring the job I hire them for is going to trigger negative evaluations and so forth. Long before that happens, such a person would be confronted with their own job performance, compared line by line with their job description. The real concern is that this entire exercise can be a real time-waster for all parties involved. By the way, a Ph.D is not truly required for this to be a problem, but I saw it happen, twice actually. I was not directly involved in either case, but it was like watching someone else's car accident. It makes you think a little more about your own driving habits.
I don't assume "all PhDs are underqualified, conceited, etc." (although your post might make me reconsider :-)
I do not have a "No Ph.D's allowed policy", but everyone recalls their past experiences when they make decisions. Having said that, each person has to be considered as an individual.
This may come as a shock to you, but the resume screening process consists of reading documents and making assumptions about the people who wrote them. After all, a resume by itself proves nothing! I see certain things, I make certain assumptions. The interview process is where I give people a chance to prove or disprove the assumptions. I am fully prepared for the possibility of a Ph.D applicant who has great answers for my questions and disproves any assumptions I might have. Asking the right questions is how I explore the assumptions. Keeping an open mind and being prepared to abandon one's assumptions is part of the game plan.
One of my best hiring experiences was a person with an MSCS degree. The person did the job I hired them for, earned a promotion, and ultimately went to the pharmaceutical industry for better pay. In the end, it was a mutually beneficial experience. In the world of management, that's as good as it gets.
In my opinion, you are incredibly naieve if you don't think employers make assumptions about Ph.Ds, just as they make assumptions about high school dropouts. In some cases, the Ph.D degree creates the assumption of knowledge and credibility -- that's great. All I'm saying is that not all the Ph.D assumptions are positive. One of the other posts has a little more detail on the concept of not-so-great assumptions about Ph.Ds.
All rhetoric aside, employer assumptions about Ph.Ds demanding a premium salary (or quickly changing jobs in pursuit of it) is probably the biggest obstacle of all.
As a manager, I occasionally see Ph.D applicants for software positions. My fear is that if I hire a Ph.D, they will assume that their degree makes them my boss, instead of the other way around. The person I hire might simply ignore their job and try to do mine instead. If they start to schmooze with senior management (instead of doing the job for which they were hired), they will either (a) convince the top brass that they should be running I.T. or (b) manufacture some other "more challenging" job in the organization for themselves. This leaves me with at best a refill of a vacant position; at worst a total loss, since the person and position might get re-assigned. With an MS degree, this problem is reduced and with a BS it is eliminated.
I have plenty of confidence in my skill and experience, it's just that I once worked in higher education. I saw some wacky behavior from people who thought the Ph.D was a replacement for experience.
As you say, learning the basics is really important. However, everyone has to decide for themselves, just how much education is enough. In the long run, a person's willingness to keep up with technology will determine their career success more than anything that happens in college.
The core problem is that rentware requires trusting your vendor. The industry in general has had too many trust-related problems that were triggered either by greed or loss of revenue that had to be made up somehow.
I used to work in higher education; we relied almost totally on DEC (aka Digital) products for hardware & software. (For our younger readers, DEC was once one of the most profitable, stable companies in America, along with being the number 2 computer manufacturer.) Back in the 1980's, the concept of DEC going out of business seemed about as likely as an alien invasion from Mars.
DEC gave us free annual licenses for practically every software package they sold (think of it as "rentware" without the "rent"). We had EVERYTHING -- operating systems, databases, applications, languages, tools, you name it. Commercial customers paid big bucks for this software (evidently not big enough).
As DEC began to fall apart, the applications were sold off, piece by piece to third parties. Not only did we lose our "free stuff", some of the new vendors charged high prices for licenses and provided lousy support for products that no longer as tightly integrated as they once were. The commercial customers with perpetual licenses had the option of holding their current versions while they considered their options. We had to quickly find ways to eliminate our dependence on literally dozens of software packages before the licenses expired.
If this could happen to the once-mighty DEC, how much faith do we have in lesser companies? Back in the 1980's, we were all naieve about the stability of corporations, especially the biggies. Not anymore.