One problem I have yet to see a satisfactory explanation for is this; since most of the stars in our galaxy are older than our own by millions of years, if there were any other intelligent races with anything in common with our mindset at least some would have evolved long long before us.
Even with todays technology, and completely disregarding the possibility of FTL travel, the capability of building generation ships travelling at a fraction of the speed of light would be within grasp of a civilization similar to our own. If a species evolved even some hundred million years ago they would have managed to populate most of the galaxy within a short period of time (on the astronomical scale of time). This should lead to at least some sign of intelligence, but why isnt some found?
They logically should be undercut, yes. Do you buy Joka-Cola? Do you buy generic (tm) ketchup? Do you ask for Tap Water at the resturant? If so, go ahead and buy CheapBytes. But obviously the market doesnt quite work the logical way, because a huge number of consumers go with Coke or Pepsi, Heinz and Evian, even while they are more expensive.
Brand names have a certain value. If Redhat does, and I belive they do, their buisness model will work fine.
Redhat is in a commodity market. Their buisness model is to sell support and their distribution. Their idea is to be the Heinz of the Linux buisness. Their method is to increase the linux market by leaps and bounds until it can support such a buisness, because they want to be a brand-name vendor in a mass commodity market.
Are they successful? Does it work? Well, you see about as many people equating Linux with Redhat as you see people equating Ketchup with Heinz. In my opinion that is hugely successful.
Will it be hugely profitable? Not likely. The very idea of Opensource and Redhats buisness model is to create the ultimate commodity market where Linux is as prevalent as water. Still, Evian makes money from water, dont they?
If some dot-com investor weenies didnt read the actual buisness model or the large amount of information and interviews available on just these very things and paid software-monopoly worth for a commodity buisness then that's their problem, not Redhats.
Mass market productivity software is dead (altho it still has a fair amount of life support) simply because there is a limited number of features that has some use in such software. Office software has been pretty much dead since Office 95, and no significant development has been made in half a decade. Bug fixes and changing file formats is just life support and an artifical market.
Productivity software in the windows market is dead. You cannot create a mass market productivity application in that market. It will be either a give-away product tagging on to a few corporate sales for survival, or it will be a short cash-in until Microsoft takes over the niche and integrates it into Windows if its popular enough. On the GNU/Linux side the dynamic is a bit different, but basically the same; the needed features will make it into free office productivity suites, and the unneeded features arent a strong enough selling point to have any market.
There are only two real markets for software that have some long-term viability and that is entertainment software and vertical markets. And support, but that isnt a product.
That is the way all consumer software will go, in my opinion. If there are enough people who want it and use it, it will get created and maintained. Software products like word processors that eventually become 'finished' in the sense that they fulfill what 99.9% of the users want wont have a market because there simply isnt anything to create a valuable diffrentiation in (and no, changing the document format so people have to upgrade doesnt really count).
Of course, the same thing applies to the Windows market, but in a different way. If enough people want it Microsoft will make it to take that market and you're out of buisness anyway.
Its too bad for those companies, but they should probably move on to either games or vertical applications markets or some other segment that will remain viable.
That isnt quite true either. According to the study where that number likely comes from 70% of developers sometimes use KDE, while 64% sometimes use gnome.
Of course, this type of statistic sounds very dubious. You could do a search on freshmeat for GNOME or KDE, count the applications and you'd get something not very reliable too.
They'll probably wonder why their computer isnt getting wiped out by viruses a couple of times per month too, and miss those phonecalls from friends telling them they have gotten blackholed out of the friends mailbox for spreading macro viruses.
Because... C isnt nearly as compiler dependent as C++, because you can actually link object code from different C compilers together, and generally because C++ code is a PITA to get to compile correctly in a crossplatform manner? Of course, that's just 10 years of experience compiling things, so maybe I've just had a bad luck streak.
Most rural areas that have any population density will get DSL service within a few years. The rest simply wont be able to pay the actual cost of running a sattelite operation.
Im sure it's practical for the small percentage living outside DSL-profitable zones, but it is a very small percentage. It isnt really a question of the usefulness (Iridium was sure useful for those who needed mobile phone coverage in unpopulated areas), but a question on wether it is possible to make it profitable. Will it be worth it when every town of 1000 people or more within a 3.5 km radius is DSL connected, and the rest have to pay for the sattelite upkeep?
The whole thing sounds pretty much like Iridium 2. This is useful for polar expeditions, mountain climbers and african not-for-profit organizations, groups that Iridium showed (in practice, since theory isnt enough for some...) cannot support the costs of running a massive sattelite network. For everyone else various DSL services will be cheaper and faster, and for the providers *far* easier to upgrade.
Neither will it improve to anything useful for a huge segment of the population, since the latency is there and will remain there unless they figure out a way to speed up the speed of light.
Shooting unsupportable junk into orbit isnt even cool as space science.
Just deactivate Javascript and Java and netscape is fairly stable. You rarely need it. If a site _has_ to have Javascript to run, just use one of their competitors instead.
Windows, in most its incarnations, is fairly stable for single app installs. Install OS, install the application, run along.
It isnt until you've been running for a while and installing things, done a few patches that break other things, upgraded Office, upgraded hardware with vendor supplied drivers, etc that things start failing randomly.
That is the reason that every new version of windows appears more stable than the last, because by the time the new version is released most peoples old versions will be randomly crashing a few times per week.
Coincidentally it is also why a lot of Windows tech support spends its time reinstalling windows from scratch.
Not really. Shaved monkeys with MCSE's cost less than a Unix admin. But in that case, do expect that the script kiddies will have more access to your data than yourself.
If you want a good NT admin they cost about the same as a unix admin.
Patents do not push for innovation, not even in the long run, when used to block development. It is not in the interest of the patent holder that competing technology is developed, with or without the use of their patents. Patent holders like rambus who attempt to push patented technology into standard boards against agreements want the control to block development, relying on the long time to market for the products to milk what they can out of everyone complying with standards.
Companies will pay royalties if they can easily pass the cost along to the consumer and dont have to go through the bother of getting the patent overturned. In this case Samsung and others play nice with Rambus while letting Micron do the dirty work.
If I worked at Rambus I'd watch my back tho... Some memory manufacturers might pretend to be friendly but they'd love to see rambus dead and gone.
I doubt the source code hasnt been available in the right circles already. It wouldnt be that hard for a disgruntled employee to burn a few cd's at work and share with friends who spread it around. NDA's arent the same as 'encrypted and viewable only from a secure terminal with no output device'.
However, it will be interesting to see how many backdoors they installed into the sourcecode of the various microsoft product during their three months of playing around.
After all, having instant access at will to every machine running the next release of any Microsoft product would be useful for them, I suppose.
Your customer has competition. The competitions site works, loads faster and is probably cheaper since they havent spent a load of money on "Web Experience", but rather something to get the job done without hassles.
Thankyou for playing, please stand in the line of bankrupt dotcoms.
Well, in the pharmaceutical industry the major abuses occur through blocking of any development at all of certain things. The pharmaceutical companies develop something, patent it, go through a profit analysis and decides there isnt a big enough market for the substance to be profitably developed to a finished product. They still retain the patent however, and for one reason or the other may choose to block development by other corporations or public funded projects.
For that type of development I'd rather see a 'develop a product within a certain time or lose the patent' kind of rule.
The internet? A decade earlier? Developed by whom? Corporations? I think not.
What corporate development had as internet wannabies were a whole load of incompatible crappy BBS systems. That's what we'd have today if it werent for the very basic anticorporate development that the internet is. Do you actually believe that any corporation would develop a network that makes it so difficult to charge for, much less control, the traffic?
If the internet was developed by a corporation you'd be paying per minute. And per byte transferred. And per mail sent. And per anything they could build the supporting protocols into counting.
Well, there already are standardized tests (specweb) for webpage serving and Linux outperforms NT 3 to 1 on a 4 CPU machine.
The problem, of course, with complex benchmarks is that you can make them show pretty much what you want, and the results are rarely applicable on real world situations. Microsoft will just fake the results, get found out, and fake a new round. That's their usual strategy.
Stratus provides 5-nines availability for HARDWARE, since they make fault tolerant systems. They dont guarantee anything wrt the operating system. Having that hardware working sure is good so you can have 99.999 availability on those bluescreens...
True, but consider this; a drug company develops a drug to cure a disease. This disease affects both cows and humans, and the same drug is usable for treating both. However, as the disease is rather rare in humans, it is not valuable to develop that track any more. However, as the cow-cure track goes ahead they patent the base, preventing any company from selling the cure for the disease in humans. Suddenly the patent has blocked advancement.
How to solve it? I dont know. Revoke the patent rights for anyone abusing their patent? Place the burden of proof on the patent holder, and allow duplicated 'good faith' research (so that a patent holder cannot sue someone who developed the same thing without knowing about the original patent)?
As is today, it doesnt work anymore, and it's actively hindering human progress in many cases.
Slashdot Mirror
One problem I have yet to see a satisfactory explanation for is this; since most of the stars in our galaxy are older than our own by millions of years, if there were any other intelligent races with anything in common with our mindset at least some would have evolved long long before us.
Even with todays technology, and completely disregarding the possibility of FTL travel, the capability of building generation ships travelling at a fraction of the speed of light would be within grasp of a civilization similar to our own. If a species evolved even some hundred million years ago they would have managed to populate most of the galaxy within a short period of time (on the astronomical scale of time). This should lead to at least some sign of intelligence, but why isnt some found?
Well, the basic problem is that the guys who did the launch math have quit, so the guys who did the buisness plan math are in charge.
The latter have been known to make errors.
They logically should be undercut, yes. Do you buy Joka-Cola? Do you buy generic (tm) ketchup? Do you ask for Tap Water at the resturant? If so, go ahead and buy CheapBytes. But obviously the market doesnt quite work the logical way, because a huge number of consumers go with Coke or Pepsi, Heinz and Evian, even while they are more expensive.
Brand names have a certain value. If Redhat does, and I belive they do, their buisness model will work fine.
Redhat is in a commodity market. Their buisness model is to sell support and their distribution. Their idea is to be the Heinz of the Linux buisness. Their method is to increase the linux market by leaps and bounds until it can support such a buisness, because they want to be a brand-name vendor in a mass commodity market.
Are they successful? Does it work? Well, you see about as many people equating Linux with Redhat as you see people equating Ketchup with Heinz. In my opinion that is hugely successful.
Will it be hugely profitable? Not likely. The very idea of Opensource and Redhats buisness model is to create the ultimate commodity market where Linux is as prevalent as water. Still, Evian makes money from water, dont they?
If some dot-com investor weenies didnt read the actual buisness model or the large amount of information and interviews available on just these very things and paid software-monopoly worth for a commodity buisness then that's their problem, not Redhats.
Mass market productivity software is dead (altho it still has a fair amount of life support) simply because there is a limited number of features that has some use in such software. Office software has been pretty much dead since Office 95, and no significant development has been made in half a decade. Bug fixes and changing file formats is just life support and an artifical market.
Productivity software in the windows market is dead. You cannot create a mass market productivity application in that market. It will be either a give-away product tagging on to a few corporate sales for survival, or it will be a short cash-in until Microsoft takes over the niche and integrates it into Windows if its popular enough. On the GNU/Linux side the dynamic is a bit different, but basically the same; the needed features will make it into free office productivity suites, and the unneeded features arent a strong enough selling point to have any market.
There are only two real markets for software that have some long-term viability and that is entertainment software and vertical markets. And support, but that isnt a product.
That is the way all consumer software will go, in my opinion. If there are enough people who want it and use it, it will get created and maintained. Software products like word processors that eventually become 'finished' in the sense that they fulfill what 99.9% of the users want wont have a market because there simply isnt anything to create a valuable diffrentiation in (and no, changing the document format so people have to upgrade doesnt really count).
Of course, the same thing applies to the Windows market, but in a different way. If enough people want it Microsoft will make it to take that market and you're out of buisness anyway.
Its too bad for those companies, but they should probably move on to either games or vertical applications markets or some other segment that will remain viable.
That isnt quite true either. According to the study where that number likely comes from 70% of developers sometimes use KDE, while 64% sometimes use gnome.
Of course, this type of statistic sounds very dubious. You could do a search on freshmeat for GNOME or KDE, count the applications and you'd get something not very reliable too.
They'll probably wonder why their computer isnt getting wiped out by viruses a couple of times per month too, and miss those phonecalls from friends telling them they have gotten blackholed out of the friends mailbox for spreading macro viruses.
Because... C isnt nearly as compiler dependent as C++, because you can actually link object code from different C compilers together, and generally because C++ code is a PITA to get to compile correctly in a crossplatform manner? Of course, that's just 10 years of experience compiling things, so maybe I've just had a bad luck streak.
Most rural areas that have any population density will get DSL service within a few years. The rest simply wont be able to pay the actual cost of running a sattelite operation.
Im sure it's practical for the small percentage living outside DSL-profitable zones, but it is a very small percentage. It isnt really a question of the usefulness (Iridium was sure useful for those who needed mobile phone coverage in unpopulated areas), but a question on wether it is possible to make it profitable. Will it be worth it when every town of 1000 people or more within a 3.5 km radius is DSL connected, and the rest have to pay for the sattelite upkeep?
I seriously doubt it.
The whole thing sounds pretty much like Iridium 2. This is useful for polar expeditions, mountain climbers and african not-for-profit organizations, groups that Iridium showed (in practice, since theory isnt enough for some...) cannot support the costs of running a massive sattelite network. For everyone else various DSL services will be cheaper and faster, and for the providers *far* easier to upgrade.
Neither will it improve to anything useful for a huge segment of the population, since the latency is there and will remain there unless they figure out a way to speed up the speed of light.
Shooting unsupportable junk into orbit isnt even cool as space science.
Just deactivate Javascript and Java and netscape is fairly stable. You rarely need it. If a site _has_ to have Javascript to run, just use one of their competitors instead.
Be sure not to patch your machines tho; IE wont install on a patched solaris machine.
Windows, in most its incarnations, is fairly stable for single app installs. Install OS, install the application, run along.
It isnt until you've been running for a while and installing things, done a few patches that break other things, upgraded Office, upgraded hardware with vendor supplied drivers, etc that things start failing randomly.
That is the reason that every new version of windows appears more stable than the last, because by the time the new version is released most peoples old versions will be randomly crashing a few times per week.
Coincidentally it is also why a lot of Windows tech support spends its time reinstalling windows from scratch.
Not really. Shaved monkeys with MCSE's cost less than a Unix admin. But in that case, do expect that the script kiddies will have more access to your data than yourself.
If you want a good NT admin they cost about the same as a unix admin.
Patents do not push for innovation, not even in the long run, when used to block development. It is not in the interest of the patent holder that competing technology is developed, with or without the use of their patents. Patent holders like rambus who attempt to push patented technology into standard boards against agreements want the control to block development, relying on the long time to market for the products to milk what they can out of everyone complying with standards.
Companies will pay royalties if they can easily pass the cost along to the consumer and dont have to go through the bother of getting the patent overturned. In this case Samsung and others play nice with Rambus while letting Micron do the dirty work.
If I worked at Rambus I'd watch my back tho... Some memory manufacturers might pretend to be friendly but they'd love to see rambus dead and gone.
I doubt the source code hasnt been available in the right circles already. It wouldnt be that hard for a disgruntled employee to burn a few cd's at work and share with friends who spread it around. NDA's arent the same as 'encrypted and viewable only from a secure terminal with no output device'.
However, it will be interesting to see how many backdoors they installed into the sourcecode of the various microsoft product during their three months of playing around.
After all, having instant access at will to every machine running the next release of any Microsoft product would be useful for them, I suppose.
As unreliable as the defacement statistics are, you should actually look at the page. NT has a good solid upward trend again, and linux sinking.
Factor in the number of sites running either and it's not very pretty statistic for NT.
Your customer has competition. The competitions site works, loads faster and is probably cheaper since they havent spent a load of money on "Web Experience", but rather something to get the job done without hassles.
Thankyou for playing, please stand in the line of bankrupt dotcoms.
Well, in the pharmaceutical industry the major abuses occur through blocking of any development at all of certain things. The pharmaceutical companies develop something, patent it, go through a profit analysis and decides there isnt a big enough market for the substance to be profitably developed to a finished product. They still retain the patent however, and for one reason or the other may choose to block development by other corporations or public funded projects.
For that type of development I'd rather see a 'develop a product within a certain time or lose the patent' kind of rule.
The internet? A decade earlier? Developed by whom? Corporations? I think not.
What corporate development had as internet wannabies were a whole load of incompatible crappy BBS systems. That's what we'd have today if it werent for the very basic anticorporate development that the internet is. Do you actually believe that any corporation would develop a network that makes it so difficult to charge for, much less control, the traffic?
If the internet was developed by a corporation you'd be paying per minute. And per byte transferred. And per mail sent. And per anything they could build the supporting protocols into counting.
Hmmm, maybe they could ask some suggestions from AOL users?
Quote 125 pages and add... me too?
Well, there already are standardized tests (specweb) for webpage serving and Linux outperforms NT 3 to 1 on a 4 CPU machine.
The problem, of course, with complex benchmarks is that you can make them show pretty much what you want, and the results are rarely applicable on real world situations. Microsoft will just fake the results, get found out, and fake a new round. That's their usual strategy.
Stratus provides 5-nines availability for HARDWARE, since they make fault tolerant systems. They dont guarantee anything wrt the operating system. Having that hardware working sure is good so you can have 99.999 availability on those bluescreens...
True, but consider this; a drug company develops a drug to cure a disease. This disease affects both cows and humans, and the same drug is usable for treating both. However, as the disease is rather rare in humans, it is not valuable to develop that track any more. However, as the cow-cure track goes ahead they patent the base, preventing any company from selling the cure for the disease in humans. Suddenly the patent has blocked advancement.
How to solve it? I dont know. Revoke the patent rights for anyone abusing their patent? Place the burden of proof on the patent holder, and allow duplicated 'good faith' research (so that a patent holder cannot sue someone who developed the same thing without knowing about the original patent)?
As is today, it doesnt work anymore, and it's actively hindering human progress in many cases.