Prior to making the decision to not release a final 1.8 version of the Mozilla Suite, did you analyze the affect this would have on large corporate customers doing internal deployments? Although we are small, I work with some fairly large entities who are using 1.4/1.7 for internal deployments (>10,000 seats in one case) and were expecting there is be a 1.8 final - even if that was the last one.
Does this decision to drop Suite 1.8 in mid-stream as it were affect the credibility of Mozilla Foundation in the long run?
> But surely a large file will not fit > through such a small cable?
AT&T used to have a commercial where a guy was sending so many faxes that a pig-in-a-python-sized lump of data went travelling down the wire, wrecking havoc wherever it went. I actually fell on the floor laughing the first time I saw it because we had a person in our office at the time who I had accused of doing exactly that.
> But, if you pulled the same thing with a highway > patrol officer, I think you'd end up with > handcuffs, not a copy of the law.
A couple months ago I was reading one of the legal blogs where they were discussing an Appeals Court case where exactly that happened. The driver waved a copy of the law at the officer, who retreated to his squad car, downloaded the law and the governing court case, read through them, and came back and said "you're wrong" and arrested the driver. Wish I could remember the link;-(
Well, that number has been "widening" every time ChoicePoint makes a "choice" to reveal more details. Currently the number is 145,000, which I believe is up from 120,000 and 20,000.
The public certainly doesn't know the number. My guess is ChoicePoint (a) knows it is higher (b) doesn't know the total.
For a long time I have had (occasionally heated) arguments with SQL addicts who insist that almost everything about an application should be coded in SQL and stored procedures. Meanwhile I have been moving all my logic away from the database engine, using APIs such as Java Data Objects, which makes my code very rapidly portable between databases.
Whereas for my part I am absolutely sick of dealing with software that does not perform well on ANY platform and cannot be moved rapidly to a new technology. "We need to deploy on PalmPilots? Too bad they don't support the neato language where we put the business logic. I guess 3 years to reimplement" - whereas if the business logic had been stored in the database, reimplemention would be a few weeks work.
Tom Kyte is of course not a disinterested observer, but his opinion based on 20 years of experience is that he can re-implement an application in (say) DB2 faster than you can move your "portable" business logic to a new platform - and the result will be 2 systems each faster, more scalable, and more secure than your portable system. Which is pretty much my experience with every "platform independent" package I have worked with.
Which doesn't even touch on the topic of data integrity...
Cross-license the entire Alpha architecture with AMD, in exchange for Opteron manufacturing rights. Give AMD the option to resume Alpha development/production if they desire.
Question is: is it too late to revive the Alpha? I suspect it is too late - the world has moved on. But something like this is worth a try for restoring H-P's credibility.
But the next question has to be, who are the potential acquirers? I don't think even the Bush II Justice Dept would allow IBM or Dell to buy H-P. Anyone else who could swing it? General Electric? Fujitsu?
AT&T is not exactly a competitor at the moment. They have never been a competitor. They were designed from the ground up to be a monopoly provider, which they were for many years. Once their monopoly status ended, they coasted by on their reputation for about another 10-15 years,
AT&T was quite competitive in the business area from 1995-2000, particularly for nationwide and international data networks. They were considerably cheaper than BT and Equant for international data and cheaper than C&W in North America, leaving them the default choice.
In fact, I thought their strategy of being a worldwide, full-service data provider was a good one. Too bad (1) they overpaid for the cable assets (2) Worldcom was cooking their books, driving Wall Street to demand equal return from AT&T. Which they couldn't do since they weren't cheating (anywhere near as much anyway).
The female members of my team consistently require special treatment for scheduling due to their children. When I say "consistently" I mean one or more of them require a day off or out of the office, or a late start or early stop every week. Every single week.
Oddly enough, when the men hit the 45-65 age range and are taking two mornings a week off to go to the cardiologist and prostate doctors' offices, and 6 weeks off every five years or so to recover from their current bypass operation, while the women keep plugging along, they tend to think it does not fall into the same category of offense.
n my opinion, Americans spend way too much effort getting into the 'best' schools. In the end, your personal achievments speak much louder than where you graduate from.
Convincing the wannabes of this is one of the keys to the Bush and Kerry families of the world maintaining their positions. How many of the Bushes went to Nowhere Massachusets State or Just North of the Border Texas U? Filtering and mating for the super-rich and super-insiders in one of the key functions of the Ivys. They let in just enough of the riff-raff based on test scores to mask this, but it is pretty clear when you look at it.
There is no such thing as a "stable" "job" anywhere in the United States today. You either work for someone else, in which case your job is only as stable as the next quarter's results (factoring out your personal performance), or you work for yourself with all the instability/risk that entails.
> because it is highly radioactive and emits mostly > alpha particles which have a large capability to > destroy cells if in close proximity.
You have absolutely no idea what you are talking about. None. You might want to spend some time reading some toxicity handbooks and/or some basic nuclear chemistry texts.
While your explanation is surely correct, one cannot ignore Fort Knox's point either. As the astronauts in _The Right Stuff_ observed, space exploration is fueled by money - political money. And the NASA-type dudes got burned early on by over-promising. So yes, I think they do build in a fairly large margin, then under-promise and over-deliver. Customers are always happier when you do that, particuarly politicians who only have an attention span of 3 news cycles (72 hours).
I'm sure you're aware that plutonium is highly radioactive and among the most lethal toxic substances known to man.
Since plutonium is neither "highly radioactive" nor "among the most lethal substances known to man", forgive me for not reading the rest of your post.
Which is not to say plutonium doesn't have to be handled carefully, because it does, but if you want to bury an RTG under my children's playset please go ahead.
Sorry if I got everyone hung up on the "90 days" part of my argument. Make it 45 or 30 or 25 if you want. But I am not going to buy that a fully-tested patch for a RedHat system running production Oracle in a high-volume mission-critical environment is going to get out the door in 3 days, short of an impending alien invasion.
And why on earth would it be reasonable to take 90 days to produce what is usually something like an obvious 5-line kernel patch?
Again keeping in mind that I am not disagreeing with you, it is still necessary to consider that (1) the patch is probably more than "5 lines", because otherwise it would have been found earler (2) security patches almost always IME have substantial side-effects and must be tested carefully (3) it takes longer than 5 days to QC, prepare, and release a patch for an enterprise-class system. I hope.
I understand your point, and I am not saying you are wrong. But the cracker dystopia (I won't say "community") is neither infinitely fast nor capable of reading security researchers' minds. Flaws which are discovered in the lab or via code review may well not be known to the crackers until they are published. Giving the kernal wizards and distribution integrators some time to develop patches _will_ improve security in this case.
If the researcher has evidence, or strongly suspects, that the exploit is in the wild then immediate publication is best. But IMHO my original statement is reasonable.
Sorry to have to disagree, particularly about someone who is clearly far above my level in most respects, but.... Linus doesn't administer any significant number of Linux systems, nor is he responsible for any significant-sized networks. While I agree that full disclosure in a reasonable period of time (say 90 days) is best, immediate disclosure can leave thousands of systems vulnerable with no patches and no reasonable way to get them patched immediately even if a fix is available.
In labor economics, there are three theories of why people pursue higher education:
Experience good (fun to get - think MA in US History)
Capital investment (like buying a machine - think BS in Engineering)
Signal to prospective employers/mates - university provides the filtering and winnowing process that addresses the cost-of-information and loser's curse problems that affect a non-local economy.
These theories are not mutually exclusive; in fact, all of them can be in operation at the same time. It is the differences among the roles and purposes of the three theories that causes this discussion to get so heated, here and on other forums.
I don't disagree in general. Correct me if I am wrong though but AMD was one of the companies that was licensed by Intel to manufacture 8086s in the era of "second sourcing". They added this knowledge to their existing fab business, so they didn't come to the CPU market cold.
Never even knew they existed. Wow. I guess either they couldn't compete, or they sucked.
Sorry I can't help with the modding - this post is both on-topic and reasonable. Harsh and perhaps a bit snarky, but it shouldn't be modded down for that.
Taking on Intel and AMD head-on is always an unlikely path to success. Still, the next big thing in processors has to come from somewhere, and if you can get enough funding to keep it running for 5 years it would be fun to try!
One key though: your first release would have to be tremendously successful right out of the gate, if not in sales at least in buzz. Transmeta's first releases were, well, who knows. So I guess they weren't successful.
Next move: sell to Intel for $50 million. Sorry investors! At least you gave Linus a place to work for a few years.
Slashdot Mirror
sPh
Prior to making the decision to not release a final 1.8 version of the Mozilla Suite, did you analyze the affect this would have on large corporate customers doing internal deployments? Although we are small, I work with some fairly large entities who are using 1.4/1.7 for internal deployments (>10,000 seats in one case) and were expecting there is be a 1.8 final - even if that was the last one.
Does this decision to drop Suite 1.8 in mid-stream as it were affect the credibility of Mozilla Foundation in the long run?
sPh
> But surely a large file will not fit
> through such a small cable?
AT&T used to have a commercial where a guy was sending so many faxes that a pig-in-a-python-sized lump of data went travelling down the wire, wrecking havoc wherever it went. I actually fell on the floor laughing the first time I saw it because we had a person in our office at the time who I had accused of doing exactly that.
sPh
> But, if you pulled the same thing with a highway
;-(
> patrol officer, I think you'd end up with
> handcuffs, not a copy of the law.
A couple months ago I was reading one of the legal blogs where they were discussing an Appeals Court case where exactly that happened. The driver waved a copy of the law at the officer, who retreated to his squad car, downloaded the law and the governing court case, read through them, and came back and said "you're wrong" and arrested the driver. Wish I could remember the link
sPh
Well, that number has been "widening" every time ChoicePoint makes a "choice" to reveal more details. Currently the number is 145,000, which I believe is up from 120,000 and 20,000.
The public certainly doesn't know the number. My guess is ChoicePoint (a) knows it is higher (b) doesn't know the total.
sPh
Tom Kyte is of course not a disinterested observer, but his opinion based on 20 years of experience is that he can re-implement an application in (say) DB2 faster than you can move your "portable" business logic to a new platform - and the result will be 2 systems each faster, more scalable, and more secure than your portable system. Which is pretty much my experience with every "platform independent" package I have worked with.
Which doesn't even touch on the topic of data integrity...
sPh
sPh
But the next question has to be, who are the potential acquirers? I don't think even the Bush II Justice Dept would allow IBM or Dell to buy H-P. Anyone else who could swing it? General Electric? Fujitsu?
sPh
In fact, I thought their strategy of being a worldwide, full-service data provider was a good one. Too bad (1) they overpaid for the cable assets (2) Worldcom was cooking their books, driving Wall Street to demand equal return from AT&T. Which they couldn't do since they weren't cheating (anywhere near as much anyway).
sPh
sPh
sPh
sPh
There is no such thing as a "stable" "job" anywhere in the United States today. You either work for someone else, in which case your job is only as stable as the next quarter's results (factoring out your personal performance), or you work for yourself with all the instability/risk that entails.
But the 1950s career ladder is gone.
sPh
> because it is highly radioactive and emits mostly
> alpha particles which have a large capability to
> destroy cells if in close proximity.
You have absolutely no idea what you are talking about. None. You might want to spend some time reading some toxicity handbooks and/or some basic nuclear chemistry texts.
sPh
While your explanation is surely correct, one cannot ignore Fort Knox's point either. As the astronauts in _The Right Stuff_ observed, space exploration is fueled by money - political money. And the NASA-type dudes got burned early on by over-promising. So yes, I think they do build in a fairly large margin, then under-promise and over-deliver. Customers are always happier when you do that, particuarly politicians who only have an attention span of 3 news cycles (72 hours).
sPh
Which is not to say plutonium doesn't have to be handled carefully, because it does, but if you want to bury an RTG under my children's playset please go ahead.
sPh
Sorry if I got everyone hung up on the "90 days" part of my argument. Make it 45 or 30 or 25 if you want. But I am not going to buy that a fully-tested patch for a RedHat system running production Oracle in a high-volume mission-critical environment is going to get out the door in 3 days, short of an impending alien invasion.
sPh
sPh
I understand your point, and I am not saying you are wrong. But the cracker dystopia (I won't say "community") is neither infinitely fast nor capable of reading security researchers' minds. Flaws which are discovered in the lab or via code review may well not be known to the crackers until they are published. Giving the kernal wizards and distribution integrators some time to develop patches _will_ improve security in this case.
If the researcher has evidence, or strongly suspects, that the exploit is in the wild then immediate publication is best. But IMHO my original statement is reasonable.
sPh
> As opposed to getting lost for the right reasons?
Linus has stated on many occasions that he discards the first 2 or 3 e-mails he receives on a given topic from anyone except the trusted few.
sPh
sPh
- Experience good (fun to get - think MA in US History)
- Capital investment (like buying a machine - think BS in Engineering)
- Signal to prospective employers/mates - university provides the filtering and winnowing process that addresses the cost-of-information and loser's curse problems that affect a non-local economy.
These theories are not mutually exclusive; in fact, all of them can be in operation at the same time. It is the differences among the roles and purposes of the three theories that causes this discussion to get so heated, here and on other forums.sPh
sPh
sPh
Taking on Intel and AMD head-on is always an unlikely path to success. Still, the next big thing in processors has to come from somewhere, and if you can get enough funding to keep it running for 5 years it would be fun to try!
One key though: your first release would have to be tremendously successful right out of the gate, if not in sales at least in buzz. Transmeta's first releases were, well, who knows. So I guess they weren't successful.
Next move: sell to Intel for $50 million. Sorry investors! At least you gave Linus a place to work for a few years.
sPh