I think one of the very real things feeding this penomenon (as well as one of the most disturbing things about/. in general) is the (apparently) prevailing attitude that anyone in in management (the dreaded "suits") is a dolt or worse.
While PHB's and empty suits certainly exist at many companies, there are also a lot of very talented, quite savvy people in these positions at some companies. Many of them even used to be hackers themselves - some still are.
Don't tar the whole bunch of them - we should all be smarter (and bigger) than that. The world is big enough for everything from open source software to hideously proprietary solutions. The market will decide where the value really is. I'd argue MS is in trouble in the market more because they have become tiresome to live with (continual forced "upgrades" and mandatory functionality like IE4) than because their software is inadequate...
Well, it ought to! The 1541 had what may be the lowest data density of any magnetic media ever in widespread use. I don't think I'd be surprised if someone told me you could read it by hand with some of that magnetic visibility fluid...
This raises an important question: How well will this handle (the admittedly pathological) case where the system on which the OS is *loaded* is not the same as the system on which it will *run*?
Case in point: I want to load Linux on the Libretto - the only reasonable way to do this is to temporarily transplant the HDD into a desktop machine, do the install, and then reimplant the HDD in the Libretto.
It would be *REALLY* slick if there were an installation option that would defer any hardware-specific mods until the first boot rather than trying to do them as part of the installation process. This is sort of the way Microsoft's OEM OS installs work (ever wonder why that "electronic break the seal" takes so long?), and one of the few things they've done right.
How about a Visio-like vector-drawing program with the automatic connectors and all, and a decent project manager that can at least read and write the Project 98 files that are the de-facto industry standard now?
OpenSource replacements for these would fill about the last remaining gaps, and if they used open (XML?) file formats as their native formats, people would have a good reason to leave MS apps behind to avoid the upgrade treadmill...
As soon as these gaps are plugged, I'm going to Linux full-time.
Traditionally, they've had a "Lite" version, which is their equivalent to the freely distributable RH version. This is the one that gets pasted inside book covers and the like.
Like RH, they also bundle commercial, non-freely-distributable software into their boxed sets. (For instance, my understanding is that you cannot legally distribute the StarOffice or WP8 CD, even though both are available for "free" eval downloads on the net.)
It looks to me like you've got some hidden reason to dislike Caldera. If you've got a valid gripe, at least have the decency not to trash a product while hiding behind a cowardly AC posting. As pointed out, Linus has said non-GPL kernel modules are fine - that's kind of the point of a loadable kernel module, allowing kernel functionality to be wrapped up in a pluggable package that's not really the kernel. If you have another beef with Caldera fine, but you can drop that one. (I've tried most modern Linux distros, and I'd be slightly more likely to recommend Caldera than RedHat to an enterprise client.)
I selected Caldera v1.1 because it was by far the most professional Linux distro on the market at that time. (Heck, it was arguably the *only* professional Linux distro on the market then - RH wasn't really a going concern yet in those days.)
Although I've had minor problems, I have to say I'm impressed enough to seriously consider buying the new 2.2 release. I may also buy the RH 2.2 release when it comes out, but in general, I think Caldera adds a lot of value. (Even Linus admits to using a commercial distro CD to save time and effort when he builds a machine, so streamlined installation has plenty of value to everyone.) I have also recently tried RH5.2, but still prefer Caldera by a bit. I've seldom used Caldera's support, but got decent responses when I did.
I do hope they've done something about their docs, which were deplorable (at least through 1.2) - A Linux manual that doesn't even mention administration, recompiling the kernel (or even bother to mention that you can avoid that in Caldera in most cases by using LISA) really is inadequate.
Let face it folks, there's just not that much difference between modern Linux distros - there's no right or wrong choice here, just a selection of flavors from which to choose! I certainly prefer a Baskin-Robbins Linux OS selection of tasty flavors to the two MS flavors of "tar" and "old dirty socks"...
While I agree in general, I don't fully understand his third point. The specs for Windows hardware compliance are pretty well documented, although the actual APIs often may not be well documented, especially on the BIOS end.
Most folks don't know how much control MS has over PC hardware - I know I didn't until I ran software for Dell's laptop div. for a while. MS pretty much completely dictates not only what hardware can (or must) do, but also how it must do it. Check out the PC9x requirements for an eye-opener: http://www.microsoft.com/hwdev/ If OEMs don't meet these requirements, they pay *much* more for the OS - enough that they're not viable competitors!
I can tell you the h/w vendors are as frustrated by MS' attitude as any of us - Win98 broke so much that almost every laptop mfr. had to do *major* BIOS rewrites just to work around the bugs. ACPI is especially problematic: code that worked perfectly with the NT implementaiton of ACPI (which is written according to the spec), would not work at all with W98 ACPI (which appears to have been written by CS 102 students.)
One good way of reforming MS would be to make them conform to their own Windows software requirements: In order to get the Windows software approval seal from MS, other vendors must pass comaptibility/capability tests, which include an uninstallability component that no MS product I know of could pass. (You'll note that MS products do NOT carry this seal!) I'd be happy if I could just actually uninstall IEx, mediaplayer, Outlook, etc. cleanly as a starting place: MS software is like Herpes - once you've got it, you've got it for life. Microsoft's near-total control of both what future PCs must do (implement MS-hooked function, their way) and how they must do that (through MS-defined calls/APIs) is one of the most important and most overlooked aspects of the entire anti-trust investigation.
This is one of the ugliest areas of PC architecture. One reason doing this in a generic way is non-trivial is that each laptop mfr. does it differently. With APM and ACPI (not in Linux yet, so far as I know) there are fianlly decent hooks into suspend-to-ram, but suspend-to-disk is still done in many different ways: some use regular fils in the FS, some use dedicated partitions, some can use a combination (Dell), and many also require a special program (never documented) to prepare the S2D target area. Combine this with the fact that different BIOSes handle this differently (although APM/ACPI helps a lot) and you understand why we have problems with this.
Oh, and then there's the point that BIOS functionality is pretty much controlled by MS now, at least for the big OEMs, since a decent MS discount structure is contingent on PC9x compliance - if you haven't looked at these standards lately, it's an eye-opener to see what MS is dictating to the PC OEMs. They will not hesitate to use this power to make life very difficult for Linux or any other challenger.
San did a great job on the NetWinder BIOS kernel - I wish him well at VA - we are all saddened by the demise of CCC, but it will be interesting to see if his Linux kernel boot monitor/BIOS can make the transition into the x86 world.
Your comment is very insightful, because it points out what a PITA it is to deal with all the various things required to do mp3 work well today. (and yes, I'm aware of things like MM+, etc.)
As long as MS controls the OS distro market and is allowed to "extend and innovate" in such a way that anything they choose is part of the OS and must be distributed by the OEMs with every new PC, they will win by fiat. Look folks, if they've killed Netscape, what makes you think they can't control a corner of the market like audio??
Until someone can stop MS from copying competing technology and giving it away as part of the OS they will continue to walk over both Internet content and delivery. Remember Bill's first and strongest reaction after his "Internet epiphany" a few years back: He was furious not because MS didn't have a browser, but because there was so little information on the Web in MS file formats! Control the format, control the game - this is one thing he understands well - don't expect him to give it up.
A while back, dell.com ran on a single Sun box - I think it was a 2-way Ultra II running the Netscape server. Microsoft noticed this and approached Dell to see about changing this over to an NT-based system. Dell hesitated (things were working well) until Microsoft came up with several million dollars as incentive. (They hardly needed to do that, since all they had to do was even hint that Dell might not get "most favored nation" pricing, but it shows how badly MS wanted it to happen, and quickly, so they funded the switchover.)
The lone Sun (actually there were two for redundancy, but a single one was capable of handling the total max load for what was at that time the world's busiest e-commerce site) was replaced by OVER A DOZEN (14 if I recall) 4-way NT servers.
Ask me how I know - Before deciding to leave Dell, one of the jobs I considered and interviewed for was heading up their internal Sun computing. (Don't believe for a second that they really "run Dell on Dell" the way Sun "runs Sun on Sun". So far as I know, Sun and IBM are the only computer companies on the planet capable of running entirely on their own gear. Dell will not be able to replace Tandem and Sun for a very long time yet.)
To construct a suspect environment where NT/IIS looks good and Linux/Apache looks bad is easy (as is finding analyst shills, unfortunately), but savvy buyers will do the math and find that real-world configs of NT/IIS will cost far more money than capacity and capability equivalent Unix-based alternatives.
FUD continues to spew forth from Redmond... Are we really surprised?
Of course you can, and you don't even need the fan once it's "lit off." You're forgetting that the exhaust gasses are not massless - they actually have quite a bit of inertia. After the first boom, the column of exhaust gasses (led by an intial shock wave) will travel back through the tailpipe (which is quite substantial on a V-1, or other pulsejet) until the pressure inside the combustion chamber is lower than ambient, at which point the reed valves/louvers open and fresh air is admitted to the chamber.
Gosh, aren't there any hot-rodders or motorheads on/.? Understanding this concept is the whole key to exceeding 100% volumetric efficiency in a normally aspirated (non turbo/super charged) motor!
BTW: What is software work for if not to pay for Ferraris? Works for me.
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I think one of the very real things feeding this penomenon (as well as one of the most disturbing things about /. in general) is the (apparently) prevailing attitude that anyone in in management (the dreaded "suits") is a dolt or worse.
While PHB's and empty suits certainly exist at many companies, there are also a lot of very talented, quite savvy people in these positions at some companies. Many of them even used to be hackers themselves - some still are.
Don't tar the whole bunch of them - we should all be smarter (and bigger) than that. The world is big enough for everything from open source software to hideously proprietary solutions. The market will decide where the value really is. I'd argue MS is in trouble in the market more because they have become tiresome to live with (continual forced "upgrades" and mandatory functionality like IE4) than because their software is inadequate...
Well, it ought to! The 1541 had what may be the lowest data density of any magnetic media ever in widespread use. I don't think I'd be surprised if someone told me you could read it by hand with some of that magnetic visibility fluid...
This raises an important question: How well will this handle (the admittedly pathological) case where the system on which the OS is *loaded* is not the same as the system on which it will *run*?
Case in point: I want to load Linux on the Libretto - the only reasonable way to do this is to temporarily transplant the HDD into a desktop machine, do the install, and then reimplant the HDD in the Libretto.
It would be *REALLY* slick if there were an installation option that would defer any hardware-specific mods until the first boot rather than trying to do them as part of the installation process. This is sort of the way Microsoft's OEM OS installs work (ever wonder why that "electronic break the seal" takes so long?), and one of the few things they've done right.
How about a Visio-like vector-drawing program with the automatic connectors and all, and a decent project manager that can at least read and write the Project 98 files that are the de-facto industry standard now?
OpenSource replacements for these would fill about the last remaining gaps, and if they used open (XML?) file formats as their native formats, people would have a good reason to leave MS apps behind to avoid the upgrade treadmill...
As soon as these gaps are plugged, I'm going to Linux full-time.
Traditionally, they've had a "Lite" version, which is their equivalent to the freely distributable RH version. This is the one that gets pasted inside book covers and the like.
Like RH, they also bundle commercial, non-freely-distributable software into their boxed sets. (For instance, my understanding is that you cannot legally distribute the StarOffice or WP8 CD, even though both are available for "free" eval downloads on the net.)
It looks to me like you've got some hidden reason to dislike Caldera. If you've got a valid gripe, at least have the decency not to trash a product while hiding behind a cowardly AC posting. As pointed out, Linus has said non-GPL kernel modules are fine - that's kind of the point of a loadable kernel module, allowing kernel functionality to be wrapped up in a pluggable package that's not really the kernel. If you have another beef with Caldera fine, but you can drop that one. (I've tried most modern Linux distros, and I'd be slightly more likely to recommend Caldera than RedHat to an enterprise client.)
I selected Caldera v1.1 because it was by far the most professional Linux distro on the market at that time. (Heck, it was arguably the *only* professional Linux distro on the market then - RH wasn't really a going concern yet in those days.)
Although I've had minor problems, I have to say I'm impressed enough to seriously consider buying the new 2.2 release. I may also buy the RH 2.2 release when it comes out, but in general, I think Caldera adds a lot of value. (Even Linus admits to using a commercial distro CD to save time and effort when he builds a machine, so streamlined installation has plenty of value to everyone.) I have also recently tried RH5.2, but still prefer Caldera by a bit. I've seldom used Caldera's support, but got decent responses when I did.
I do hope they've done something about their docs, which were deplorable (at least through 1.2) - A Linux manual that doesn't even mention administration, recompiling the kernel (or even bother to mention that you can avoid that in Caldera in most cases by using LISA) really is inadequate.
Let face it folks, there's just not that much difference between modern Linux distros - there's no right or wrong choice here, just a selection of flavors from which to choose! I certainly prefer a Baskin-Robbins Linux OS selection of tasty flavors to the two MS flavors of "tar" and "old dirty socks"...
Most folks don't know how much control MS has over PC hardware - I know I didn't until I ran software for Dell's laptop div. for a while. MS pretty much completely dictates not only what hardware can (or must) do, but also how it must do it. Check out the PC9x requirements for an eye-opener: http://www.microsoft.com/hwdev/ If OEMs don't meet these requirements, they pay *much* more for the OS - enough that they're not viable competitors!
I can tell you the h/w vendors are as frustrated by MS' attitude as any of us - Win98 broke so much that almost every laptop mfr. had to do *major* BIOS rewrites just to work around the bugs. ACPI is especially problematic: code that worked perfectly with the NT implementaiton of ACPI (which is written according to the spec), would not work at all with W98 ACPI (which appears to have been written by CS 102 students.)
One good way of reforming MS would be to make them conform to their own Windows software requirements: In order to get the Windows software approval seal from MS, other vendors must pass comaptibility/capability tests, which include an uninstallability component that no MS product I know of could pass. (You'll note that MS products do NOT carry this seal!) I'd be happy if I could just actually uninstall IEx, mediaplayer, Outlook, etc. cleanly as a starting place: MS software is like Herpes - once you've got it, you've got it for life. Microsoft's near-total control of both what future PCs must do (implement MS-hooked function, their way) and how they must do that (through MS-defined calls/APIs) is one of the most important and most overlooked aspects of the entire anti-trust investigation.
This is one of the ugliest areas of PC architecture. One reason doing this in a generic way is non-trivial is that each laptop mfr. does it differently. With APM and ACPI (not in Linux yet, so far as I know) there are fianlly decent hooks into suspend-to-ram, but suspend-to-disk is still done in many different ways: some use regular fils in the FS, some use dedicated partitions, some can use a combination (Dell), and many also require a special program (never documented) to prepare the S2D target area. Combine this with the fact that different BIOSes handle this differently (although APM/ACPI helps a lot) and you understand why we have problems with this.
Oh, and then there's the point that BIOS functionality is pretty much controlled by MS now, at least for the big OEMs, since a decent MS discount structure is contingent on PC9x compliance - if you haven't looked at these standards lately, it's an eye-opener to see what MS is dictating to the PC OEMs. They will not hesitate to use this power to make life very difficult for Linux or any other challenger.
San did a great job on the NetWinder BIOS kernel - I wish him well at VA - we are all saddened by the demise of CCC, but it will be interesting to see if his Linux kernel boot monitor/BIOS can make the transition into the x86 world.
Your comment is very insightful, because it points out what a PITA it is to deal with all the various things required to do mp3 work well today. (and yes, I'm aware of things like MM+, etc.)
As long as MS controls the OS distro market and is allowed to "extend and innovate" in such a way that anything they choose is part of the OS and must be distributed by the OEMs with every new PC, they will win by fiat. Look folks, if they've killed Netscape, what makes you think they can't control a corner of the market like audio??
Until someone can stop MS from copying competing technology and giving it away as part of the OS they will continue to walk over both Internet content and delivery. Remember Bill's first and strongest reaction after his "Internet epiphany" a few years back: He was furious not because MS didn't have a browser, but because there was so little information on the Web in MS file formats! Control the format, control the game - this is one thing he understands well - don't expect him to give it up.
A while back, dell.com ran on a single Sun box - I think it was a 2-way Ultra II running the Netscape server. Microsoft noticed this and approached Dell to see about changing this over to an NT-based system. Dell hesitated (things were working well) until Microsoft came up with several million dollars as incentive. (They hardly needed to do that, since all they had to do was even hint that Dell might not get "most favored nation" pricing, but it shows how badly MS wanted it to happen, and quickly, so they funded the switchover.)
The lone Sun (actually there were two for redundancy, but a single one was capable of handling the total max load for what was at that time the world's busiest e-commerce site) was replaced by OVER A DOZEN (14 if I recall) 4-way NT servers.
Ask me how I know - Before deciding to leave Dell, one of the jobs I considered and interviewed for was heading up their internal Sun computing. (Don't believe for a second that they really "run Dell on Dell" the way Sun "runs Sun on Sun". So far as I know, Sun and IBM are the only computer companies on the planet capable of running entirely on their own gear. Dell will not be able to replace Tandem and Sun for a very long time yet.)
To construct a suspect environment where NT/IIS looks good and Linux/Apache looks bad is easy
(as is finding analyst shills, unfortunately), but savvy buyers will do the math and find that real-world configs of NT/IIS will cost far more money than capacity and capability equivalent Unix-based alternatives.
FUD continues to spew forth from Redmond... Are we really surprised?
Of course you can, and you don't even need the fan once it's "lit off." You're forgetting that the exhaust gasses are not massless - they actually have quite a bit of inertia. After the first boom, the column of exhaust gasses (led by an intial shock wave) will travel back through the tailpipe (which is quite substantial on a V-1, or other pulsejet) until the pressure inside the combustion chamber is lower than ambient, at which point the reed valves/louvers open and fresh air is admitted to the chamber.
/.? Understanding this concept is the whole key to exceeding 100% volumetric efficiency in a normally aspirated (non turbo/super charged) motor!
Gosh, aren't there any hot-rodders or motorheads on
BTW: What is software work for if not to pay for Ferraris? Works for me.