As I worked with and know people in the contract manufacturing industry, I do have some knowledge of how it works.
The Flextronics XBox plants in Mexico and particularly in Hungary were not NPI facilities. I am not sure where you came up with that idea. The XBox plant in Hungary was newly setup and staffed by 1,000 workers who will shortly be sent packing.
And the costs incurred by moving production from those plants to China will be somewhat substantial. I expect Flextronics forced Microsoft to incur a bit of the hit there. And the BS about moving production to China because that is where the components are made is just that BS. They are moving to China because of labor costs.
The Microsoft XBox production volume is flat and declining. Everyone will tell you that. There is countless evidence from NVidia and Intel press releases, to anecdotal evidence that in Europe and Japan, XBox has only managed a meager 200,000 per territory.
Any analysis of the XBox manufacturing story is incomplete without looking at how Flextronics (the XBox manufacturer) recently told us they will be pulling XBox manufacturing out of Mexico and Hungary (the two current locations of XBox factories) and going into China. Flextronics is taking a serious financial hit. They made a financial gamble on the XBox and they are losing it bigtime. The low margin at which they are manufacturing the XBox only made business sense if the XBox moved in volume and it isn't. Console prices go down and profits goes up when the volume of the pieces goes up. That isn't happening with XBox. It has flopped in Japan and flopped in Europe.
So the behind the scenes story of the XBox is rather simple: the Flextronics gamble failed so at this point Flextronics is cutting their loses. Flextronics is losing big money on this deal and they are scared shitless at losing more.
Microsoft has also stated that they are looking at other manufacturing partners for the XBox. The only question here is can they find another sucker like Flextronics who will be willing to take the same plunge. Its highly doubtful. Who wants to work with Microsoft at this point when all they have to do is look at the Microsoft/NVidia mix up which basically amounts to Microsoft refusing to pay what they said they would.
Microsoft is poisoning the well and destroying all chances they have in the future of securing hardware partnerships for the XBox2. They are a fish out of water. They are accustomed to abusing their business parters and getting away with it because they are the monopoly.
And the entire fiasco from another perspective: no one cares about the human beings who lost their jobs (in Mexico and Hungary) because the international manufacturing juggernaut (Flextronics) decided to axe their livelihoods in order to "serve their customers better".
>> Anybody who has played Counterstrike in the last year knows how bad it can get in a laissez faire environment.
There are many people scared away from Counterstrike by the cheating. But you have to take the good with the bad. There are reasons why Counterstrike is the most popular form of online FPS gaming and one of the most popular forms of online gaming period:
(1) Counterstrike was created and evolves because of the fan base. The creative and sustaining energy of counterstrike isn't possible in the sterialized Microsoft world.
(2) Quality FPS performance and gaming isn't possible on a console. Without a keyboard and mouse, FPS gaming will never make it on the gaming console. The precision required to excel at counterstrike is only possible with a mouse. The same is also true of online role playing.
You might expect a gaming system that is doing 50% of the business in Europe to be selling 50% of the games. It turns out that at no point has the XBox ever managed to do that. It hasn't even come close.
Where are you facts? Post a link to something besides a Microsoft press release.
Your version of the truth is conviently stuck inside your head.
You are the idiot. The press release doesn't make any sense (see my reply to your original post). Simply because Microsoft says something doesn't mean it is true.
Yes, there were numerous reports around the web that MS pre-April 26th sales were low. Look around the web for yourself. If you can't understand the fact that it was impossible for XBox to hold ~50% of the market at the time from the period of XBox launch up to April 29th (the data points that MS cited), then you can safely be ignored as a true moron.
Thank you for confirming exactly what I said: there are no official reports on actual units shipped/sold for XBox in Europe. The unofficial rumor is 200,000. As the Cube did more than that in its launch week, then we can quite easily say that the XBox is dead and buried in Europe. Why are you asking me for XBox sales info? That's just what I was hoping to get from you.
Go read http://www.elspa.com/. Then try not to cry your eyes out, cause the XBox is sucking so bad in Europe.
The XBox launch in the US was decent. But it was still way outsold by the PS2 and matched by the Cube. What's this babbling about a port of a PC RPG (Morrowind) saving XBox sales? You can come up with something better than that.
The original point remains true: Microsoft has little if no hope in this market with only a sliver of what's available from the US market.
Your Micrsoft press release really is pathetic evidence of anything aside from the fact that Microsoft is one of the better marketers (pathological liars) out there. Do you have anything else?
Take a close look at your press release. Microsoft cut the price of the XBox on the 26th of April. This naturally resulted in a large short-term increase in sales as many of the fence sitters and hard core gamers picked up the system. They then sample data from the week of the 29th of April ( (1) Data from ChartTrack, 29 April 2002) to support this assertion: "Xbox represents 49% of the next generation console market in the United Kingdom".
I can guarantee you based on the pathetic sales of XBox prior to the 29th of April, that there was zero chance of the XBox representing ~50% of sales of next gen consoles in Europe up to that point in time from the XBox launch. Microsoft is feeding you its typical line of bullshit and you are only too happy to open up and swallow.
If XBox sales are so strong in Europe, then why is another price drop being rumored (http://www.cube-europe.com/news/102137936781456.h tml).
Here is a question for you. How many total units has XBox shipped in Europe? That's right you don't know. You don't know because MS is afraid to release such figures. They won't even release estimates. The only numbers that matter are total units shipped. And even that number can be deceptive because total units shipped doesn't always translate into total units purchased.
Nintendo has shipped 400,000 Cubes in Europe since their launch. A number that has been backed up by others in the industry.
Visit this site to see European software sales: http://www.elspa.com/.
The only question remaining for the XBox and Microsoft is whether or not the XBox can be a viable product in only 1 of the 3 major consoles markets. Japan and Europe are over for the XBox. For whatever reason people in those two major markets didn't buy the XBox. And once a product flops as badly as the XBox has in those markets, it is difficult, if not impossible to recover.
Points of fact:
(1) Halo sold a mere 5,000 copies in the most recent week in Japan. The most of any XBox title.
(2) Following its hugely successful launch in Europe, Nintendo is dominating the software charts there and will most likely easily slip into the "PS2 alternative" slot which the XBox had coveted.
(3) Recent data shows the Cube outselling the XBox in the US.
The larger implications of the XBox having failed in both Europe and Japan are that third party game support will soon trickle away. It simply won't make economic sense for game makers to support the XBox when its only market is a small piece of the US pie. Microsoft has managed to bribe/buy out/conjole a tepid welcome for the XBox after its launch and through the next 6 months. But once those game makers see how badly the box is selling, that support will quickly fade away.
The hard truth really is quite simple for Microsoft: the XBox will _never_ succeed with only a portion of the US market. Without 3rd party support the XBox is DEAD.
Just lay off the editors. They've got other things to do like spending working day after working day in front of their playstations. They are also responsible for planning and resourcing trips to the movie theatre. You think that the deep and insightful movie reviews that we are lucky enough to find here just appear out of thin air?
We should be thankful that they're busy schedules allow any resources at all to be devoted to posting and researching these stories. Who can honestly say that its humanly possible for any of them to pay attention to what was posted only 24 to 48 hours ago? Any of us would surely make the same mistakes after our 10th hour of redbulled fueled Final Fantasy.
And don't you dare mention any thing like a review period or even the most simplistic of approval mechanisms for their postings. Because you would then clearly be in league with the RIAA, BillG, (or insert favorite techno-nazi here) and denying them their right to post whatever they want when they want.
I've started an Outlook clone that is database-backed, cross-platform and includes support for KDE. Its basically a traditional client server database application at this point. Its more comparable to Windows based PIMs like GoldMine and ACT!. Its called Advance.
Where have you been the past few years? In case you haven't heard ~30% of servers ship with Linux. Those numbers are from IDC. Where'd you get your 2% figure?
In case you haven't heard entire countries (China) and major cities are dumping Windows and switching to Linux.
A dimwit like you warms a chair in one of Apple's stores for 9 months and suddenly he is an industry market share expert! Funny stuff.
Let's have a poll on this subject. Who can name the MS products that have produced the smallest revenue compared to the money that MS invested in development and marketing. Two of the biggest money pits at MS have been:
(1) Windows DataCenter. This product has thoroughly bombed. Last year it was rumored that only a couple dozen had made it out the door.
(2) MS BizTalk Server. Another "MS Enterprise" computing product that despite _immense_ marketing spend, is really sucking ass.
MS is doing this marketing campaign because their enterprise computing strategies have thus far fallen off a cliff. This is just more money thrown to the wind. People aren't buying MS enterprise computing product.
Oh, and give aways like IE don't count for this poll.
Hmm, I can't decide it you are a troll, a MS drone or an idiot. If I wanted to get Exchange server functionality, I might do something like run Lotus Notes (from IBM), OpenMail (from HP), iPlanet (from Sun/AOL) or the product from Bynari Solutions.
As I can't seriously believe you didn't know about these options, I will now deem you to be a MS drone.
Re:Why does /. have to concentrate on this film?
on
LoTR Takes 4 Oscars
·
· Score: 2
At least LoTR was up front about the subject matter and focus of the film being Fantasy. On the other hand, what we got from A Beautiful Mind was a Fantasy in the guise of a realistic depiction of John Nash's life. Major problems with ABM:
(1) ZERO attempt to actual explain in even layman's terms the theories that Nash was working on.
(2) ZERO attempt to show more of the actual and historic strife in the relationship that Nash had with his wife.
(3) ZERO attempt to even hint at the fact that Nash was bi-sexual.
Ron Howard so candy coated the life of John Nash that this film deserves nothing but disrepect.
I too was annoyed at this. I have purchased every release of Mandrake that they ever put out. Do they considering they are annoying people who purchase through retail with crap like that?
I am seriously considering switching distros at this point. I have come to the realization that Mandrake simply is capable of presenting itself as a professional organization. Mandrake's corporate culture is almost entirely devoid of professionalism.
Business decisions are not made at Mandrake. Mandrake really is a bunch of hackers in a couple rooms somewhere in Paris. They just throw in whatever they think is the latest and greatest into their distro.
From a product side I am just getting sick and tired of the pathetically designed and unprofessional tools that Mandrake provides. The english language translation of the text in the UI of most of the Mandrake tools simply just sucks and it isn't getting any better.
Example of how unprofessional the Mandrake apps are: open the Mandrake control center, click on a module, click on a different module, even though no modifications were made you get a dialog that says: "The modifications done in the current module won't be saved." Passable english, but it wouldn't get past QA in my software company. And that's just one minor example. The warning dialog has a caption of "drakcon.real". ??? I have given up trying to decipher what the Mandrake icons are supposed to look like. There is little or no UI uniformity between the tools.
Considering the current state of the Be, they should probably change their name to Was.
Re:.NET according to Steve Ballmer & friends
on
What is .NET?
·
· Score: 2
Sun already replied to the MS Pet Store implementation. Sorry but I don't have a link to the reply.
Basically, MS implemented a thin DB class layer over some stored procedures and compared it to a full J2EE example application. For some crazy reason MS's pathetic knock off unenterprise ready example is faster.
This bit from the inquirer is good, had to be editied a bit cause no strike tag is allowed here:
WHO WOULD have predicted early in the case of the Department of Justice (DoJ) versus Microsoft that in 2002 both would not only be paddling the same canoe but spinning the same yarn?
But, good golly Miss Molly, and Holy Pixellation! the unthinkable seems to have happened, with the Dow Jones newswire saying that the Great Vole and the DoJ want a one day hearing to settle the affair.
So much so that they've issued a joint filing to the mediator appointed to clean the Augean stables, hmm, i mean, settle the matter.
But clearly the biggest mistake that Gates and his evil hearted minions made was to bring the eye of the government upon themselves before they had the key components of their next generation framework inside a patent protected harbor.
Consider this alternate reality: Microsoft doesn't blow its sham of a business model in a quest after meaningless web browser market share. It instead safely lies low preparing.NET with many of its key components patented.
And prior to.NET, in this alternate realm, Microsoft could successfully have been enforcing patent claims against open source technologies like SAMBA without fear of the DOJ boom coming down upon their actions. WINE would have been obliterated many years ago in a flurry of lawsuits. Tools that were even tangently related to any of MS patents could have been targeted.
We should be pleased that Microsoft didn't have the intelligence and forebearance to pull something like this off. Open source wouldn't be nearly where it is today. As to whether they can turn the patent tables in their favor in the future, is yet to be seen.
Your definiton of "free" appears to only be "free as in beer", while the real people behind open source software value it because it is "free" in a different way.
You are right that Ximian has bitten off more than it can chew. As it is highly unlikely that Ximian is profitable at this point, its quite likely that Ximian won't survive long enough to actually use Mono in any form that produces revenue. Small startups like Ximian in this day and age are not in the business of doing fundamental R&D on development platforms. I'd like to know how this waste of money is rationalized to Ximian's investors. What mono based products will Ximian release in two/three years (when the platform is ready) that can justify the expenditure of this capital? None. I do hope that they can survive on the products that they have released and will be releasing that don't use Mono, but from a business perspective hiring 5 guys (300,000 per year expenditure) to work on this project is utter insanity.
Application development for Linux already is easy. With the arrival of Kylix, C++ Builder, the many Java development environments, the maturation of QT, Python GUI alternatives, KDevelop, development under Linux isn't in the least bit challenging as compared to three years ago.
Perhaps Miguel's problem is that he has been programming in C and GTK+. How many fewer lines of code would Evolution have required and how quicker could have Ximian released products if he wasn't using those less than rapid development tools?
Slashdot Mirror
As I worked with and know people in the contract manufacturing industry, I do have some knowledge of how it works.
The Flextronics XBox plants in Mexico and particularly in Hungary were not NPI facilities. I am not sure where you came up with that idea. The XBox plant in Hungary was newly setup and staffed by 1,000 workers who will shortly be sent packing.
And the costs incurred by moving production from those plants to China will be somewhat substantial. I expect Flextronics forced Microsoft to incur a bit of the hit there. And the BS about moving production to China because that is where the components are made is just that BS. They are moving to China because of labor costs.
The Microsoft XBox production volume is flat and declining. Everyone will tell you that. There is countless evidence from NVidia and Intel press releases, to anecdotal evidence that in Europe and Japan, XBox has only managed a meager 200,000 per territory.
Any analysis of the XBox manufacturing story is incomplete without looking at how Flextronics (the XBox manufacturer) recently told us they will be pulling XBox manufacturing out of Mexico and Hungary (the two current locations of XBox factories) and going into China. Flextronics is taking a serious financial hit. They made a financial gamble on the XBox and they are losing it bigtime. The low margin at which they are manufacturing the XBox only made business sense if the XBox moved in volume and it isn't. Console prices go down and profits goes up when the volume of the pieces goes up. That isn't happening with XBox. It has flopped in Japan and flopped in Europe.
So the behind the scenes story of the XBox is rather simple: the Flextronics gamble failed so at this point Flextronics is cutting their loses. Flextronics is losing big money on this deal and they are scared shitless at losing more.
Microsoft has also stated that they are looking at other manufacturing partners for the XBox. The only question here is can they find another sucker like Flextronics who will be willing to take the same plunge. Its highly doubtful. Who wants to work with Microsoft at this point when all they have to do is look at the Microsoft/NVidia mix up which basically amounts to Microsoft refusing to pay what they said they would.
Microsoft is poisoning the well and destroying all chances they have in the future of securing hardware partnerships for the XBox2. They are a fish out of water. They are accustomed to abusing their business parters and getting away with it because they are the monopoly.
And the entire fiasco from another perspective: no one cares about the human beings who lost their jobs (in Mexico and Hungary) because the international manufacturing juggernaut (Flextronics) decided to axe their livelihoods in order to "serve their customers better".
Links:
Hungary XBox plant shutdown
XBox software sales in Europe
>> Anybody who has played Counterstrike in the last year knows how bad it can get in a laissez faire environment.
There are many people scared away from Counterstrike by the cheating. But you have to take the good with the bad. There are reasons why Counterstrike is the most popular form of online FPS gaming and one of the most popular forms of online gaming period:
(1) Counterstrike was created and evolves because of the fan base. The creative and sustaining energy of counterstrike isn't possible in the sterialized Microsoft world.
(2) Quality FPS performance and gaming isn't possible on a console. Without a keyboard and mouse, FPS gaming will never make it on the gaming console. The precision required to excel at counterstrike is only possible with a mouse. The same is also true of online role playing.
So Taco, does this mean that you are retracting your previously largely positive review of Phantom Menace.
Or has that been wiped from that highly reliable memory of yours?
The truth does hurt. Here it is:
http://www.elspa.com/
You might expect a gaming system that is doing 50% of the business in Europe to be selling 50% of the games. It turns out that at no point has the XBox ever managed to do that. It hasn't even come close.
Where are you facts? Post a link to something besides a Microsoft press release.
Your version of the truth is conviently stuck inside your head.
Let's go over this again...
You are the idiot. The press release doesn't make any sense (see my reply to your original post). Simply because Microsoft says something doesn't mean it is true.
Yes, there were numerous reports around the web that MS pre-April 26th sales were low. Look around the web for yourself. If you can't understand the fact that it was impossible for XBox to hold ~50% of the market at the time from the period of XBox launch up to April 29th (the data points that MS cited), then you can safely be ignored as a true moron.
Thank you for confirming exactly what I said: there are no official reports on actual units shipped/sold for XBox in Europe. The unofficial rumor is 200,000. As the Cube did more than that in its launch week, then we can quite easily say that the XBox is dead and buried in Europe. Why are you asking me for XBox sales info? That's just what I was hoping to get from you.
Go read http://www.elspa.com/. Then try not to cry your eyes out, cause the XBox is sucking so bad in Europe.
The XBox launch in the US was decent. But it was still way outsold by the PS2 and matched by the Cube. What's this babbling about a port of a PC RPG (Morrowind) saving XBox sales? You can come up with something better than that.
The original point remains true: Microsoft has little if no hope in this market with only a sliver of what's available from the US market.
Your Micrsoft press release really is pathetic evidence of anything aside from the fact that Microsoft is one of the better marketers (pathological liars) out there. Do you have anything else?
Take a close look at your press release. Microsoft cut the price of the XBox on the 26th of April. This naturally resulted in a large short-term increase in sales as many of the fence sitters and hard core gamers picked up the system. They then sample data from the week of the 29th of April ( (1) Data from ChartTrack, 29 April 2002) to support this assertion: "Xbox represents 49% of the next generation console market in the United Kingdom".
I can guarantee you based on the pathetic sales of XBox prior to the 29th of April, that there was zero chance of the XBox representing ~50% of sales of next gen consoles in Europe up to that point in time from the XBox launch. Microsoft is feeding you its typical line of bullshit and you are only too happy to open up and swallow.
If XBox sales are so strong in Europe, then why is another price drop being rumored (http://www.cube-europe.com/news/102137936781456.
Here is a question for you. How many total units has XBox shipped in Europe? That's right you don't know. You don't know because MS is afraid to release such figures. They won't even release estimates. The only numbers that matter are total units shipped. And even that number can be deceptive because total units shipped doesn't always translate into total units purchased.
Nintendo has shipped 400,000 Cubes in Europe since their launch. A number that has been backed up by others in the industry.
Visit this site to see European software sales: http://www.elspa.com/.
Halo was launched in Japan. It just didn't manage to sell.
Listen to: http://biz.yahoo.com/oo/020502/73479.html
Also see the game charts at:
www.the-magicbox.com.
The only question remaining for the XBox and Microsoft is whether or not the XBox can be a viable product in only 1 of the 3 major consoles markets. Japan and Europe are over for the XBox. For whatever reason people in those two major markets didn't buy the XBox. And once a product flops as badly as the XBox has in those markets, it is difficult, if not impossible to recover.
Points of fact:
(1) Halo sold a mere 5,000 copies in the most recent week in Japan. The most of any XBox title.
(2) Following its hugely successful launch in Europe, Nintendo is dominating the software charts there and will most likely easily slip into the "PS2 alternative" slot which the XBox had coveted.
(3) Recent data shows the Cube outselling the XBox in the US.
The larger implications of the XBox having failed in both Europe and Japan are that third party game support will soon trickle away. It simply won't make economic sense for game makers to support the XBox when its only market is a small piece of the US pie. Microsoft has managed to bribe/buy out/conjole a tepid welcome for the XBox after its launch and through the next 6 months. But once those game makers see how badly the box is selling, that support will quickly fade away.
The hard truth really is quite simple for Microsoft: the XBox will _never_ succeed with only a portion of the US market. Without 3rd party support the XBox is DEAD.
Just lay off the editors. They've got other things to do like spending working day after working day in front of their playstations. They are also responsible for planning and resourcing trips to the movie theatre. You think that the deep and insightful movie reviews that we are lucky enough to find here just appear out of thin air?
We should be thankful that they're busy schedules allow any resources at all to be devoted to posting and researching these stories. Who can honestly say that its humanly possible for any of them to pay attention to what was posted only 24 to 48 hours ago? Any of us would surely make the same mistakes after our 10th hour of redbulled fueled Final Fantasy.
And don't you dare mention any thing like a review period or even the most simplistic of approval mechanisms for their postings. Because you would then clearly be in league with the RIAA, BillG, (or insert favorite techno-nazi here) and denying them their right to post whatever they want when they want.
Then check out Advance.
Advance is designed to look like Outlook. Its QT based, multi-user and database-backed. It includes support for KDE.
Midway was actually a much argued about compromise. Gate's preferred code name was Hiroshima.
Ballmer convince Gates that a code name that referenced the deaths of a mere couple thousand Japanese would be less controversial.
For anyone wanting an alternative to Evolution:
I've started an Outlook clone that is database-backed, cross-platform and includes support for KDE. Its basically a traditional client server database application at this point. Its more comparable to Windows based PIMs like GoldMine and ACT!. Its called Advance.
web site
screen shot
Where have you been the past few years? In case you haven't heard ~30% of servers ship with Linux. Those numbers are from IDC. Where'd you get your 2% figure?
In case you haven't heard entire countries (China) and major cities are dumping Windows and switching to Linux.
A dimwit like you warms a chair in one of Apple's stores for 9 months and suddenly he is an industry market share expert! Funny stuff.
Let's have a poll on this subject. Who can name the MS products that have produced the smallest revenue compared to the money that MS invested in development and marketing. Two of the biggest money pits at MS have been:
(1) Windows DataCenter. This product has thoroughly bombed. Last year it was rumored that only a couple dozen had made it out the door.
(2) MS BizTalk Server. Another "MS Enterprise" computing product that despite _immense_ marketing spend, is really sucking ass.
MS is doing this marketing campaign because their enterprise computing strategies have thus far fallen off a cliff. This is just more money thrown to the wind. People aren't buying MS enterprise computing product.
Oh, and give aways like IE don't count for this poll.
"complete lack of server-side productivity"...
Hmm, I can't decide it you are a troll, a MS drone or an idiot. If I wanted to get Exchange server functionality, I might do something like run Lotus Notes (from IBM), OpenMail (from HP), iPlanet (from Sun/AOL) or the product from Bynari Solutions.
As I can't seriously believe you didn't know about these options, I will now deem you to be a MS drone.
At least LoTR was up front about the subject matter and focus of the film being Fantasy. On the other hand, what we got from A Beautiful Mind was a Fantasy in the guise of a realistic depiction of John Nash's life. Major problems with ABM:
(1) ZERO attempt to actual explain in even layman's terms the theories that Nash was working on.
(2) ZERO attempt to show more of the actual and historic strife in the relationship that Nash had with his wife.
(3) ZERO attempt to even hint at the fact that Nash was bi-sexual.
Ron Howard so candy coated the life of John Nash that this film deserves nothing but disrepect.
I too was annoyed at this. I have purchased every release of Mandrake that they ever put out. Do they considering they are annoying people who purchase through retail with crap like that?
I am seriously considering switching distros at this point. I have come to the realization that Mandrake simply is capable of presenting itself as a professional organization. Mandrake's corporate culture is almost entirely devoid of professionalism.
Business decisions are not made at Mandrake. Mandrake really is a bunch of hackers in a couple rooms somewhere in Paris. They just throw in whatever they think is the latest and greatest into their distro.
From a product side I am just getting sick and tired of the pathetically designed and unprofessional tools that Mandrake provides. The english language translation of the text in the UI of most of the Mandrake tools simply just sucks and it isn't getting any better.
Example of how unprofessional the Mandrake apps are: open the Mandrake control center, click on a module, click on a different module, even though no modifications were made you get a dialog that says: "The modifications done in the current module won't be saved." Passable english, but it wouldn't get past QA in my software company. And that's just one minor example. The warning dialog has a caption of "drakcon.real". ??? I have given up trying to decipher what the Mandrake icons are supposed to look like. There is little or no UI uniformity between the tools.
Man, you are smoking some good stuff. I don't know which of your fantasies is crazier:
.NET.
(1) J2EE, which currently dominates the Enterprise software market, losing out anytime soon to
(2) Itanium rescuing itself from its current death spiral.
Considering the current state of the Be, they should probably change their name to Was.
Sun already replied to the MS Pet Store implementation. Sorry but I don't have a link to the reply.
Basically, MS implemented a thin DB class layer over some stored procedures and compared it to a full J2EE example application. For some crazy reason MS's pathetic knock off unenterprise ready example is faster.
Just more MS FUD.
This bit from the inquirer is good, had to be editied a bit cause no strike tag is allowed here:
WHO WOULD have predicted early in the case of the Department of Justice (DoJ) versus Microsoft that in 2002 both would not only be paddling the same canoe but spinning the same yarn?
But, good golly Miss Molly, and Holy Pixellation! the unthinkable seems to have happened, with the Dow Jones newswire saying that the Great Vole and the DoJ want a one day hearing to settle the affair.
So much so that they've issued a joint filing to the mediator appointed to clean the Augean stables, hmm, i mean, settle the matter.
I agree with you on patents in .NET.
.NET with many of its key components patented.
.NET, in this alternate realm, Microsoft could successfully have been enforcing patent claims against open source technologies like SAMBA without fear of the DOJ boom coming down upon their actions. WINE would have been obliterated many years ago in a flurry of lawsuits. Tools that were even tangently related to any of MS patents could have been targeted.
But clearly the biggest mistake that Gates and his evil hearted minions made was to bring the eye of the government upon themselves before they had the key components of their next generation framework inside a patent protected harbor.
Consider this alternate reality: Microsoft doesn't blow its sham of a business model in a quest after meaningless web browser market share. It instead safely lies low preparing
And prior to
We should be pleased that Microsoft didn't have the intelligence and forebearance to pull something like this off. Open source wouldn't be nearly where it is today. As to whether they can turn the patent tables in their favor in the future, is yet to be seen.
Your definiton of "free" appears to only be "free as in beer", while the real people behind open source software value it because it is "free" in a different way.
You are right that Ximian has bitten off more than it can chew. As it is highly unlikely that Ximian is profitable at this point, its quite likely that Ximian won't survive long enough to actually use Mono in any form that produces revenue. Small startups like Ximian in this day and age are not in the business of doing fundamental R&D on development platforms. I'd like to know how this waste of money is rationalized to Ximian's investors. What mono based products will Ximian release in two/three years (when the platform is ready) that can justify the expenditure of this capital? None. I do hope that they can survive on the products that they have released and will be releasing that don't use Mono, but from a business perspective hiring 5 guys (300,000 per year expenditure) to work on this project is utter insanity.
Application development for Linux already is easy. With the arrival of Kylix, C++ Builder, the many Java development environments, the maturation of QT, Python GUI alternatives, KDevelop, development under Linux isn't in the least bit challenging as compared to three years ago.
Perhaps Miguel's problem is that he has been programming in C and GTK+. How many fewer lines of code would Evolution have required and how quicker could have Ximian released products if he wasn't using those less than rapid development tools?