Set your mailbox limit to 4 megabytes. And put a link in your "message too big" folder that directs them to a tutorial on FTP.
Why would you do that? Now you've got all your users learning about FTP on company time and probably calling the help desk to use up their time too. User-friendliness saves $$ in a big company.
Most users have reached a point where they can send an attachment (or maybe I should say that most email clients have reached a point where users can figure out how to attach files), but most users don't know or want to know how to ftp. Why force a learning experience on them when you have the hardware and bandwidth to provide large email attachments?
Honestly, for general unix stuff, mirrored 7200rpm drives and intel hardware would probably draw a fifth of the power The main plant at Forest City employs over 3500, and they build motorhomes from scratch, including extruding their own aluminum windowframes and arcwelding their chassis together. If this mainframe took 50x the power, it wouldn't be noticed. PLus, it's _already running_ for other purposes, so it's actually saving power by taking yet another small box off the grid.
I'm sure Mercury was glad to sell them my name, vehicle make & model, address-everything That stuff is all public information; they get it from the DMV.
Microsoft Office XP doesn't appear to run under Win95, nor under NT until SP6:
This is from the Office XP FAQ:
Does Office XP require Microsoft Windows® XP?
A. No. Office XP Professional will run on Microsoft Windows 98, Microsoft Windows Millennium Edition (Windows Me), Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional, and Microsoft Windows NT® 4.0 with Service Pack 6 (SP6) or later. Windows XP will deliver the best Windows experience and, combined with Office XP, the best computer experience, but it is not required for Office XP.
Sounds like M$ can barely hit their own moving target.
There are a number of groups of teachers invovled in OSS and Linux. Theyu have banded together recently to form the schoolforge project at http://www.schoolforge.net
Also see http://www.seul.org/edu which is one of the groups that began the schoolforge alliance.
A lot of the teachers involved have been doing some great things with Linux on very small budgets, both in the US and around the world.
See www.invisiblestereo.com They sell a large version of something similar where you attach the coil to the back side of drywall, or under your floor, turning your wall or floor into a speaker. It sounds pretty good, and its fun to have people try to find the speakers in your house. I know a guy who has 40 of them all over his home.
That is probably partially true, but you also need to remember that the midwestern states tend to have the best public schools, as measured by test scores, anyway. I think Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Nebraska usually are in the top of the rankings. Of course, a lot of that may be due to socio-economic factors, but as far as explaining midwestern tech-savviness, the school systems should get a little credit.
Open-Source software will *Never* achieve the same level of usage as Commercial software does unless the quality and quantity of Open-Source software equals that of Commercial software.
This is basically a meaningless sentence. How are you going to compare "level of usage" between OSS and proprietary software? Are you going to count is as "usage" when someone surfs a website which runs OSS, as just one example? What if they use a PVR with embedded Linux inside, as another example?
If you're talking about desktop computing as we think of it today, then you are missing the most important piece of the puzzle. It's not a question of whether OSS apps are of the same quality and quantity, although that is important in the long run. The important thing is that proprietary software and hardware be available to run on Linux.
At work I cannot go Linux until two specialized apps that I need all the time can run under Linux. One of them has a web client that is almost there, the other will be a problem for much longer. The workstations I maintain also run a Windows only interface and a number of Windows only apps. If these apps were available in Linux versions, I would change all the machines over tomorrow. it's not the OSS apps that matter, it's the propirietary apps that are holding me back.
Thay can't lower prices. To ensure their massive cash flow they need stock prices to keep rising and the only way it will do that is if they post revenue increases.
I'm afraid you've got it backwards, there. To ensure their high stock prices, they must continue to increase earnings year over year.
what would make these investors believe that the final outcome of this new venture will prove to be any more profitable
They bought it for less than $300k. Someone else took the mulimillion dollar bath on the R&D of this thing, so they don't have much to lose. It's all upside potential and little or no downside.
Now, if the goal is for all or most content to be hobby-level, that's fine for some people, but people are also going to want some variety, and they are also going to want professionally-produced content.
Well, I wouldn't say it's a goal. It's just the way it's gonna be. Anyone who wants to record a song and put it out there now can do it. It is a fundamental shift in the way music gets heard.
There will still be many people who will be able to make a living as artists, musicians, and authors, but if you want to be a published author, you now have the option of publishing worldwide for zero cost and without ever getting a rejection slip in your life. If you and your friends want to produce a sitcom, you can do it in your home and upload it for anyone to see. The large media companies no longer control access. When I was a kid, there were three tv channels, now there are hundreds. Soon there may be thousands. Just a couple years ago, if I wanted to listen to a radio station in Paraguay or Pakistan, I wouldn't have been able to. Now I can stop typing for a moment and find one--I can listen to any of thousands of online radio stations, some of them professional and some of them are just kids who love a certain kind of music and know how to stream content to the web. It's a different marketplace than it was when I was a kid in a small town that only had two radio stations--one country and one top 40. There are thousands of options for listening to music; and just as importantly the barrier to entry has been lowered to almost zero.
Besides, the value of Linux is far from zero. I've paid for at least four boxed versions.
Yes, but if you went to M$ or Apple to purchase all the equivalent software that you would find on a couple of RH cd's, you would pay hundreds or maybe a couple thousand $. I know there are still gaps in the usability of OSS, so it's not an apples to apples comparison, but you also have to remember that that RH cd can be freely loaded on to a thousand boxen if you wish.
The OSS model may transfer to certain types of online collaborations. Animation comes to mind. Maybe screenwriting. I don't know if the kind of music I like to listen to would be the same if the musicians weren't in the same room, but ya never know.
Then there will be no content. It's that simple. Isn't that the big complaint about the Internet already?
No way. The web is already the vastest collection of content ever assembled, and it's only a couple years old. The glib complaints of "no content" are simply untrue. Linux itself is a good example of the kind of high quality user-created content that will proliferate. Unfortunately, low-quality content will proliferate even more. View at -1 threshold for some examples.
There seems to be the possibility that all these new technologies have for all practical purposes rendered copyright useless, especially since the people who trade these items do so for free.
I don't have a good answer to it this problem. I don't mind seeing the production companies, etc. make money on their products.
The problem for the book/magazine/record/movie/tv industries and the artists who work for them is:
1. Digitized media is virtually impossible to prevent from being copied and shared for free.
2. The cost of producing and publishing high-quality content is approaching zero. Anyone with some home recording equipment can write, record, edit, and publish their work on the internet without having to go through the large publishing entities.
This leads the conclusion that the market value of content will approach zero in the future. In the long term they cannot win the battle, but in the short term they can cling to their old ways of thinking, in which they can sell a $.35 cd for $19.95 because they have the legal monopoly (copyright) on that product. That's all that's happening here. In the long term they cannot win this war.
Eventually, rather than very few artists or companies making $millions, there will be a millions of artists making a little money each. Whether you think that's right or wrong doesn't matter, it's just the way it's gonna be.
Ten years ago, if I wanted to write a book and publish it myself, it would have cost thousands of dollars to print up a few copies, and then I could have had to figure out a way to get it Out There. Now I can do it for ZERO cost. Just like this post to/.
Copyright 2002, all rights reserved, madfgurtbn worldwide publishing, inc.
The default/icon issue relates to something MS had been doing for years: exercising strict control over what OEMs could and couldn't install and how they present MS's OS.
That's quite a spin on the situation, if you ask me. The only reason MS can "exercise strict control" is because of the monopoly. And, IIRC, they would only allow a Netscape icon if the OEM's would pay more for each Windows install with such an icon. I could be seriously misunderstanding the facts, but that's my recollection.
So what has Microsoft done differently by including IE in Windows?
As I understand it, the biggest thing they did wrong was lock out Netscape by illegally forcing OEM's to agree not to include any other browser with their new Dell, dude.
Later postings asked members if they knew anyone -- "a jeweler or a mortgage broker or real estate agent or banker" --who could run a credit report on the seller.
IANAL, but I used to be a bill collector. One time my employer had a person from Equifax come in to give a presentation about credit reports. According to her, virtually anyone who takes a financial risk on you can legally and properly request your credit report from. That includes landlords, business partners, insurance companies, and so on. According to her, you coudl get one on a potential roommate who would sign a lease with you, as one example.
That was about 10 years ago, so I'm not sure what the rules are now, or how accurate her presentation was, but under her definition, these people certainly took a financial risk on these transactions, so they should be able to just write to Equifax or TRW and puchase a copy of the guy's credit report legitimately.
For the average user, I think better stay with Windows
You are probably right, but the users in the article are well supported by professional IT persons who take care of the config details for them. So they really really aren't average users, but are average users with a good support team, and it seems to work pretty well for them. (although I wouldn't mind hearing from more of the rank and file at the company).
This is exactly the reason that bandwidth must eventually be sold as bandwidth, rather than on a per computer basis. It becomes very difficult to even define "computer" once you are using multi-users on one machine, and once you start hooking every device in the home up to the network. What about a PVR or a PDA? What about those refridgerators that order more food for you from webvan when you run out of milk (OK bad example) There's just no way to enforce it as a home LAN becomes standard equipment. Right now they are even selling static IP's, but they can't get way with that once IP's are no longer a scarce commodity.
When you look out into the future, there is no way that they can charge per node. For now they can only because they have local monopolies.
They use different OS's for different purposes within the system. The so-called OS they wrote is described in the article. It's a collection of tools for controlling their parallel computer, which is a collection of many inexpensive computers running the BSD and Linux OS's you talk about.
The interviewer is the one who describes it as an OS. The interviewee expains that the real breakthrough is that with their tools an ordinary programmer can operate in a parallel computing environment-- you don't need a specialist in parallel computing anymore. Which leads to the conclusion that relatively small institutions on relatively small budgets can build enormously powerful computers with massive storage.
Google, and others, also cache a lot of content. If a web provider doesn't want their stuff cached on The WayBack, all they have to do is include the no bots code in their html.
If MS is banking on consumer laziness, then that is a perfectly fine tactic. The computer users want a web browser on their computers, and Microsoft is giving them one that fullfills their needs. If they don't like it, they can look around for another one.
I'm sure you understand that downloading Netscape over a 28k modem took many hours back then, and MS forced OEM's not to included Netscape. That's the part that was "forced" illegally.
You are correct that no one used a gun, and that there was always theoretically the option of downloading NS. But you are not correct that it was laziness on consumer's part, and you are not correct that MS didn't do anything illegal.
I actually downloaded the NS browser, but had a very difficult time of it, due to my ISP's line-camping policies which automatically disconnected you after, IIRC, 4 hours continuous connection.
Netscape is now attempting to collect the civil damages due them for the proven criminal behavior of the MS monopoly.
Your version is mostly correct, but you left out some important details. By the time 4.0 and 5.0 came out, Netscape was effectively dead because every computer came with a free version of IE, and no OEM was allowed, because of MS's illegal monpolistic practices, to include Netscape also.
Also during that time about 10 zillion new boxen were sold to newbies, because they wanted to get on the internet and send email to grandma and surf a little pr0n.
Right there on the desktop it said "The Internet" and there was no other option to click on besides IE because MS would not allow it. That's where the crime was, and that has been settled as a fact of law. Now AOL is just trying to collect the damages caused at that time.
Netscape never kept up tecnically, because so much default newbie traffic went to msn instead of Netscape, so there was no income stream to spend on upgrading Netscape. No one ever really thought that you could make money selling browser software, the goal was eyeballs on your site.
Slashdot Mirror
Set your mailbox limit to 4 megabytes. And put a link in your "message too big" folder that directs them to a tutorial on FTP.
Why would you do that? Now you've got all your users learning about FTP on company time and probably calling the help desk to use up their time too. User-friendliness saves $$ in a big company.
Most users have reached a point where they can send an attachment (or maybe I should say that most email clients have reached a point where users can figure out how to attach files), but most users don't know or want to know how to ftp. Why force a learning experience on them when you have the hardware and bandwidth to provide large email attachments?
Honestly, for general unix stuff, mirrored 7200rpm drives and intel hardware would probably draw a fifth of the power
The main plant at Forest City employs over 3500, and they build motorhomes from scratch, including extruding their own aluminum windowframes and arcwelding their chassis together. If this mainframe took 50x the power, it wouldn't be noticed. PLus, it's _already running_ for other purposes, so it's actually saving power by taking yet another small box off the grid.
I'm sure Mercury was glad to sell them my name, vehicle make & model, address-everything
That stuff is all public information; they get it from the DMV.
Microsoft Office XP doesn't appear to run under Win95, nor under NT until SP6 :
This is from the Office XP FAQ:
Does Office XP require Microsoft Windows® XP?
A. No. Office XP Professional will run on Microsoft Windows 98, Microsoft Windows Millennium Edition (Windows Me), Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional, and Microsoft Windows NT® 4.0 with Service Pack 6 (SP6) or later. Windows XP will deliver the best Windows experience and, combined with Office XP, the best computer experience, but it is not required for Office XP.
Sounds like M$ can barely hit their own moving target.
There are a number of groups of teachers invovled in OSS and Linux. Theyu have banded together recently to form the schoolforge project at http://www.schoolforge.net
Also see http://www.seul.org/edu which is one of the groups that began the schoolforge alliance.
A lot of the teachers involved have been doing some great things with Linux on very small budgets, both in the US and around the world.
See www.invisiblestereo.com They sell a large version of something similar where you attach the coil to the back side of drywall, or under your floor, turning your wall or floor into a speaker. It sounds pretty good, and its fun to have people try to find the speakers in your house. I know a guy who has 40 of them all over his home.
That is probably partially true, but you also need to remember that the midwestern states tend to have the best public schools, as measured by test scores, anyway. I think Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Nebraska usually are in the top of the rankings. Of course, a lot of that may be due to socio-economic factors, but as far as explaining midwestern tech-savviness, the school systems should get a little credit.
The VTOL aircraft Osprey has killed US Marines due to a software error which became occurred in reponse to a hardware problem:
/
http://www.cnn.com/2001/US/04/05/arms.osprey.02
Open-Source software will *Never* achieve the same level of usage as Commercial software does unless the quality and quantity of Open-Source software equals that of Commercial software.
This is basically a meaningless sentence. How are you going to compare "level of usage" between OSS and proprietary software? Are you going to count is as "usage" when someone surfs a website which runs OSS, as just one example? What if they use a PVR with embedded Linux inside, as another example?
If you're talking about desktop computing as we think of it today, then you are missing the most important piece of the puzzle. It's not a question of whether OSS apps are of the same quality and quantity, although that is important in the long run. The important thing is that proprietary software and hardware be available to run on Linux.
At work I cannot go Linux until two specialized apps that I need all the time can run under Linux. One of them has a web client that is almost there, the other will be a problem for much longer. The workstations I maintain also run a Windows only interface and a number of Windows only apps. If these apps were available in Linux versions, I would change all the machines over tomorrow. it's not the OSS apps that matter, it's the propirietary apps that are holding me back.
Thay can't lower prices. To ensure their massive cash flow they need stock prices to keep rising and the only way it will do that is if they post revenue increases.
I'm afraid you've got it backwards, there. To ensure their high stock prices, they must continue to increase earnings year over year.
what would make these investors believe that the final outcome of this new venture will prove to be any more profitable
They bought it for less than $300k. Someone else took the mulimillion dollar bath on the R&D of this thing, so they don't have much to lose. It's all upside potential and little or no downside.
Now, if the goal is for all or most content to be hobby-level, that's fine for some people, but people are also going to want some variety, and they are also going to want professionally-produced content.
Well, I wouldn't say it's a goal. It's just the way it's gonna be. Anyone who wants to record a song and put it out there now can do it. It is a fundamental shift in the way music gets heard.
There will still be many people who will be able to make a living as artists, musicians, and authors, but if you want to be a published author, you now have the option of publishing worldwide for zero cost and without ever getting a rejection slip in your life. If you and your friends want to produce a sitcom, you can do it in your home and upload it for anyone to see. The large media companies no longer control access. When I was a kid, there were three tv channels, now there are hundreds. Soon there may be thousands. Just a couple years ago, if I wanted to listen to a radio station in Paraguay or Pakistan, I wouldn't have been able to. Now I can stop typing for a moment and find one--I can listen to any of thousands of online radio stations, some of them professional and some of them are just kids who love a certain kind of music and know how to stream content to the web. It's a different marketplace than it was when I was a kid in a small town that only had two radio stations--one country and one top 40. There are thousands of options for listening to music; and just as importantly the barrier to entry has been lowered to almost zero.
Besides, the value of Linux is far from zero. I've paid for at least four boxed versions.
Yes, but if you went to M$ or Apple to purchase all the equivalent software that you would find on a couple of RH cd's, you would pay hundreds or maybe a couple thousand $. I know there are still gaps in the usability of OSS, so it's not an apples to apples comparison, but you also have to remember that that RH cd can be freely loaded on to a thousand boxen if you wish.
The OSS model may transfer to certain types of online collaborations. Animation comes to mind. Maybe screenwriting. I don't know if the kind of music I like to listen to would be the same if the musicians weren't in the same room, but ya never know.
Then there will be no content. It's that simple. Isn't that the big complaint about the Internet already?
No way. The web is already the vastest collection of content ever assembled, and it's only a couple years old. The glib complaints of "no content" are simply untrue. Linux itself is a good example of the kind of high quality user-created content that will proliferate. Unfortunately, low-quality content will proliferate even more. View at -1 threshold for some examples.
There seems to be the possibility that all these new technologies have for all practical purposes rendered copyright useless, especially since the people who trade these items do so for free.
/.
I don't have a good answer to it this problem. I don't mind seeing the production companies, etc. make money on their products.
The problem for the book/magazine/record/movie/tv industries and the artists who work for them is:
1. Digitized media is virtually impossible to prevent from being copied and shared for free.
2. The cost of producing and publishing high-quality content is approaching zero. Anyone with some home recording equipment can write, record, edit, and publish their work on the internet without having to go through the large publishing entities.
This leads the conclusion that the market value of content will approach zero in the future. In the long term they cannot win the battle, but in the short term they can cling to their old ways of thinking, in which they can sell a $.35 cd for $19.95 because they have the legal monopoly (copyright) on that product. That's all that's happening here. In the long term they cannot win this war.
Eventually, rather than very few artists or companies making $millions, there will be a millions of artists making a little money each. Whether you think that's right or wrong doesn't matter, it's just the way it's gonna be.
Ten years ago, if I wanted to write a book and publish it myself, it would have cost thousands of dollars to print up a few copies, and then I could have had to figure out a way to get it Out There. Now I can do it for ZERO cost. Just like this post to
Copyright 2002, all rights reserved, madfgurtbn worldwide publishing, inc.
Redhat's is pure lawyer speak, but Ralph Nader and KDE league are readable and persuasive.
The default/icon issue relates to something MS had been doing for years: exercising strict control over what OEMs could and couldn't install and how they present MS's OS.
That's quite a spin on the situation, if you ask me. The only reason MS can "exercise strict control" is because of the monopoly. And, IIRC, they would only allow a Netscape icon if the OEM's would pay more for each Windows install with such an icon. I could be seriously misunderstanding the facts, but that's my recollection.
So what has Microsoft done differently by including IE in Windows?
As I understand it, the biggest thing they did wrong was lock out Netscape by illegally forcing OEM's to agree not to include any other browser with their new Dell, dude.
Later postings asked members if they knew anyone -- "a jeweler or a mortgage broker or real estate agent or banker" --who could run a credit report on the seller.
IANAL, but I used to be a bill collector. One time my employer had a person from Equifax come in to give a presentation about credit reports. According to her, virtually anyone who takes a financial risk on you can legally and properly request your credit report from. That includes landlords, business partners, insurance companies, and so on. According to her, you coudl get one on a potential roommate who would sign a lease with you, as one example.
That was about 10 years ago, so I'm not sure what the rules are now, or how accurate her presentation was, but under her definition, these people certainly took a financial risk on these transactions, so they should be able to just write to Equifax or TRW and puchase a copy of the guy's credit report legitimately.
For the average user, I think better stay with Windows
You are probably right, but the users in the article are well supported by professional IT persons who take care of the config details for them. So they really really aren't average users, but are average users with a good support team, and it seems to work pretty well for them. (although I wouldn't mind hearing from more of the rank and file at the company).
This is exactly the reason that bandwidth must eventually be sold as bandwidth, rather than on a per computer basis. It becomes very difficult to even define "computer" once you are using multi-users on one machine, and once you start hooking every device in the home up to the network. What about a PVR or a PDA? What about those refridgerators that order more food for you from webvan when you run out of milk (OK bad example) There's just no way to enforce it as a home LAN becomes standard equipment. Right now they are even selling static IP's, but they can't get way with that once IP's are no longer a scarce commodity.
When you look out into the future, there is no way that they can charge per node. For now they can only because they have local monopolies.
They use different OS's for different purposes within the system. The so-called OS they wrote is described in the article. It's a collection of tools for controlling their parallel computer, which is a collection of many inexpensive computers running the BSD and Linux OS's you talk about.
The interviewer is the one who describes it as an OS. The interviewee expains that the real breakthrough is that with their tools an ordinary programmer can operate in a parallel computing environment-- you don't need a specialist in parallel computing anymore. Which leads to the conclusion that relatively small institutions on relatively small budgets can build enormously powerful computers with massive storage.
Google, and others, also cache a lot of content. If a web provider doesn't want their stuff cached on The WayBack, all they have to do is include the no bots code in their html.
If MS is banking on consumer laziness, then that is a perfectly fine tactic. The computer users want a web browser on their computers, and Microsoft is giving them one that fullfills their needs. If they don't like it, they can look around for another one.
I'm sure you understand that downloading Netscape over a 28k modem took many hours back then, and MS forced OEM's not to included Netscape. That's the part that was "forced" illegally.
You are correct that no one used a gun, and that there was always theoretically the option of downloading NS. But you are not correct that it was laziness on consumer's part, and you are not correct that MS didn't do anything illegal.
I actually downloaded the NS browser, but had a very difficult time of it, due to my ISP's line-camping policies which automatically disconnected you after, IIRC, 4 hours continuous connection.
Netscape is now attempting to collect the civil damages due them for the proven criminal behavior of the MS monopoly.
Your version is mostly correct, but you left out some important details. By the time 4.0 and 5.0 came out, Netscape was effectively dead because every computer came with a free version of IE, and no OEM was allowed, because of MS's illegal monpolistic practices, to include Netscape also.
Also during that time about 10 zillion new boxen were sold to newbies, because they wanted to get on the internet and send email to grandma and surf a little pr0n.
Right there on the desktop it said "The Internet" and there was no other option to click on besides IE because MS would not allow it. That's where the crime was, and that has been settled as a fact of law. Now AOL is just trying to collect the damages caused at that time.
Netscape never kept up tecnically, because so much default newbie traffic went to msn instead of Netscape, so there was no income stream to spend on upgrading Netscape. No one ever really thought that you could make money selling browser software, the goal was eyeballs on your site.
Anyway, that's the way I remember it.
Then try right now to delete IE from your machine. Good luck!