The word is ballmer, and can be a verb or a noun. Overall it involves spreading fear, uncertainly and doubt to CEOs and other management types. It also implies a lack of understanding, deliberate or otherwise, designed to make people who read Fortune or Computer World or other paper magazines (come on, when is the last time a nerd bought a paper copy of Computer World, or ever bought a copy of Fortune?) briefly consider the briefing from one of the hairy types in the IT department that suggested using Linux, Apache and Java for a new system that is being developed.
A ballmer is a powerful thing because it only affects those people who make decisions. Those people who actually do the work see them for what they are. Unfortunately, they are not paid enough for their opinions to be valid, as senior management often only believe people who are as or more powerful than them, or those who they have paid lots of money to have an opinion.
Slashdot seems to fall prey to ballmers far too often (or indeed gets ballmered) and while it's useful for us to see these stories just in case the CEO suggests to the CTO who suggests to the IT Manager who mentions to your team leader that Linux may have a greater support overhead than Windows and might not be a good idea for that thousand server deployment that's being planned, we shouldn't take them as an indication that the sky is falling in and they should be tagged as such.
This article, good people of Slashdot, is about a ballmer as it is possible to get, without throwing a chair.
Dell aren't really selling these for the Linux hobbyist market, but are selling them as a proof of concept for the soho/business user who is looking for alternatives to Windows. Hopefully the USP will be that said user will be able to call a support line if something goes wrong and someone will be able to give answers that will resolve a problem. 7.04 does seem to be a mistake when 6.06 is the distribution with long term support but without screwing Synaptic down it would be hard for a casual desktop user not to upgrade - LTS is probably more useful for servers in a production environment. Otherwise the idea seems solid and support for specific machines and components will make the support desk's life easier, until the wireless components are changed from Intel to Broadcom to save a bit of money. Hmm. I would also be prepared to bet that the majority of service calls will be about trying to get printing to work with some 20 year old Applewriter, or worse still, a cheap GDI colour laser (note to Dell's Linux support team: foomatic is your friend).
As far as I can see they'll take your money for as long as you're willing to pay it. Your ad might fall back on to the second page of results but you're paying for the impressions as well as the clicks.
I agree with this totally, and I'm not even in the US. It's not a complicated or high volume process in the first instance, just setting up a wiki or message board and unravelling each patent and seeing if there is prior art. The reason for this is that USPTO doesn't do any diligence on patent claims because it's not equipped to do so. The intention wouldn't be to make a legal claim on the patent, merely to demonstrate that it would fail (or indeed succeed) if it came to court, and hopefully to demonstrate that software patents are mostly valueless. I'm in the UK but would happily provide server space, bandwidth and rambling anecdotage if it was needed.
The skills shortage has been evident within IBM for several years now. I was TUPEd in from Equifax in 2003 to migrate the applications that we had migrated out of IBM two years before, back into IBM. I left after the job had been done because of the battle to get resources (trying to get time with a firewall team that had about three staff, all junior, trying to find AIX resources - yep, IBM has little or no permanent AIX staff in the UK, it seems) and then the news came that Global Services had a 'problem', so I took the jump and became a contractor. Only weeks after the Great Layoff of 2005, IBM were looking for contractors to fill the posts that had been cleared out - suddenly management realised that those engineers were need for something.
I would be up for that, even if it isn't our problem in Europe - yet.
Working on the assumption that the majority of software patents are speculative, why not create a website that pulls software patents from the USPO database, and encourages users to pick them apart. Prior art would have to be verifiable with documentary evidence and the intention would not to be challenge the patent in court but to render a challenge, and therefore the patent, worthless. Of course it's also possible that the reverse could happen, but history hasn't exactly proved that so far.
I have a mild Letterman habit. Will I be able to watch last night's show on Joost, or will I get a message saying that my IP address is outside the US and I am therefore unable to watch due to copyright and licensing restrictions? I know which one my money's on.
Seasoned readers may remember that when Netscape forked the code tree for the browser and made it open source, Wang, backed by Microsoft, sued for an alleged patent infringement. Mozilla.org put out a call for cases of prior art, received several hundred, and buried the case. If Microsoft is stupid enough to go ahead with a case for any of these so-called infringements, the chances are that every one will have prior art or one kind or another. Patents rarely stand up in court with the right amount of expert support.
The protocols are getting there, even to the point of phones working as mass storage devices with OS X (Sony Ericsson W810i - I almost cried with joy when I plugged it in and it just appeared on my desktop) so they will settle in the inevitable Betamax way...
I think you're underestimating how fast battery technology moves, and how fast systems decrease in size: when 3G phones first appeared in the UK they were like the brickphones of the early 90s, but now my 3G and WiFi enabled Nokia E61 is slightly wider than a regular phone and about as slim. Surfing using 3G or WiFi is a battery hog but mean time between charges is two to three days of occasional use. I also think that we are reaching the limits of the size of the phone and personal device now for reasons of usability, and that they could go one of two ways: the truly personal device that will be a pocket sized 'candybar' like the iPhone that provides a big chunk of memory for storage and apps to retrieve that storage, or a terminal device that acts as a portal to externally stored data and applications that are paid for by subscription. Either way, this device could plug into a home system to provide different user interfaces for work and play. It sounds too straightforward even as I'm writing it but look at the way in which personal computing has changed in the last ten years and consider the personal applications that have evolved since then.
I suppose the ultimate expression of the Chinese attitude to copyright is the vast piles of Mao related tat that can be found in street markets in the big cities. A friend went to Guangzhou on a business trip a few weeks ago and came back with 'Zippo' lighters engraved with pictures of Mao. Some of it is genuine and regarded as collectible but it gets buried under cheap(er) knock-offs and genuinely odd things like Mao lava lamps and clockwork marching Maos (like those weeble sort of things - I saw these in a night market in Mong Kok, Hong Kong).
Microsoft wants its monopoly, end of. When Bill 'bet the company' on the Internet in 1995 he (or his advisors) saw that the browser was going to be the main portal. Prior to IE, MS was concentrating on the 'walled garden' approach like AOL - it's easy to forget that MSN has been around for longer than IE. IE has evolved from being a licensed afterthought to being part of the OS. There was an article here last week where someone replied that they liked IE because of the ways it could communicate with the outside world using ActiveX. Personally, I think that that approach remains dangerous and irresponsible and that a web browser is a web browser, but MS have taken the approach that it should be able to do more, and while they are not imposing this approach on third parties a choice remains available to the user.
#Boo hoo, Linux won't share driver documentation with us, boo hoo boo hoo#
The last paragraph in the left hand column on that page is frankly nonsense. Linux has more driver support because there are more people working on driver support. I would like to see evidence of any kind that the OpenBSD community has been refused driver documentation which has been given to the Linux community.
I'm not sure about overseas sales, haven't been since the announcement. Compared to Nokia's current flagship phone, the N95, the iPhone looks pretty weak. It's possible that things will change before release but while the closed system will help Apple's support overheads it restricts access to logical extensions of the system like Skype and other VoIP systems and Blackberry and Blackberry-style email systems, possibly at the behest of Cingular. My Nokia E61 from T-Mobile does Skype and VoIP over 3G as well as WLAN, but only because Symbian 60 is an open platform. But that's where the iPhone has to be to truly compete. I'm a Mac user and Unix bigot but I'm not going to consider the iPhone if and when it gets to the UK unless it can so what my E61 does now.
Ballmer's job seems to be to cast aspersions on any IT company that might be encroaching on Microsoft's world in the hope that people will pay attention, whereas it just looks like fear and loathing. Cool dance moves though.
I was talking to a friend who is a very casual PC user the other day and she told me that she had just had Ubuntu installed on her machine by her pet IT guy because she was concerned about the amount of spying that Windows did. She probably had a hooky install of Vista, but that's by the by, and it's a concern that I've seen both with XP since Genuine Advantage was enforced and with Vista.
The big sell for me is replacing Microsoft software - if I have to use Windows (and as a contractor this isn't a matter of choice - it's often down to my employer's IT policy as it is now) I try and employ as many non-MS products as possible, using PortableApps if necessary, which replaces IE with Firefox, MSN with Gaim, MSOffice with OpenOffice etc etc. I wouldn't say that these apps are 'better', just that they're better for me, although when demonstrating to other people, the price tag is a help too.
The issue behind Dell's lag in adopting a Linux distribution has rested on the ability to support it. The market for commercially supported distributions pretty much amounted to Red Hat until Ubuntu 6.06 and LTS came along, so the commitment is there. While Ubuntu is about the best desktop at the moment, the server market is where the business is at and presumbably Canonical will commit to that by distributing 6.06 and LTS.
I'm old enough and daft enough to remember the changes in the 'best' Linux desktop - RedHat gave way to Mandrake, which went to Fedora, which then changed to Ubuntu. Ubuntu is certainly the most fully featured ever, the easiest to use and pretty well supported, but I agree, the six month release cycle seems to have tripped up with 7.04 - things that worked previously have now stopped working, and not due to the Restricted Devices Manager - some badly supported wireless cards in my case, but ones that I had working with a little tinkering in the last couple of releases. Similar things happened with Mandrake when v10 came out: scripts stopped working, installs just didn't work on the laptop that I installed it on - the experience was replicated with little or no support and, as far as I could tell, users just moved away. I hope Canonical learns from the experiences of the past and keeps the spirit of an OS that 'just works' for most against the pressures of creeping featurism.
Mastercard were the official credit card and tickets and souvenirs from official shops and sites could only be bought with Mastercard. Just wait until McDonalds twig to that one...
Slashdot Mirror
A ballmer is a powerful thing because it only affects those people who make decisions. Those people who actually do the work see them for what they are. Unfortunately, they are not paid enough for their opinions to be valid, as senior management often only believe people who are as or more powerful than them, or those who they have paid lots of money to have an opinion.
Slashdot seems to fall prey to ballmers far too often (or indeed gets ballmered) and while it's useful for us to see these stories just in case the CEO suggests to the CTO who suggests to the IT Manager who mentions to your team leader that Linux may have a greater support overhead than Windows and might not be a good idea for that thousand server deployment that's being planned, we shouldn't take them as an indication that the sky is falling in and they should be tagged as such.
This article, good people of Slashdot, is about a ballmer as it is possible to get, without throwing a chair.
Dell aren't really selling these for the Linux hobbyist market, but are selling them as a proof of concept for the soho/business user who is looking for alternatives to Windows. Hopefully the USP will be that said user will be able to call a support line if something goes wrong and someone will be able to give answers that will resolve a problem. 7.04 does seem to be a mistake when 6.06 is the distribution with long term support but without screwing Synaptic down it would be hard for a casual desktop user not to upgrade - LTS is probably more useful for servers in a production environment. Otherwise the idea seems solid and support for specific machines and components will make the support desk's life easier, until the wireless components are changed from Intel to Broadcom to save a bit of money. Hmm. I would also be prepared to bet that the majority of service calls will be about trying to get printing to work with some 20 year old Applewriter, or worse still, a cheap GDI colour laser (note to Dell's Linux support team: foomatic is your friend).
*waves iPhone in face*
Until there's a # button on the keyboard. Now that's usability.
As far as I can see they'll take your money for as long as you're willing to pay it. Your ad might fall back on to the second page of results but you're paying for the impressions as well as the clicks.
I agree with this totally, and I'm not even in the US. It's not a complicated or high volume process in the first instance, just setting up a wiki or message board and unravelling each patent and seeing if there is prior art. The reason for this is that USPTO doesn't do any diligence on patent claims because it's not equipped to do so. The intention wouldn't be to make a legal claim on the patent, merely to demonstrate that it would fail (or indeed succeed) if it came to court, and hopefully to demonstrate that software patents are mostly valueless. I'm in the UK but would happily provide server space, bandwidth and rambling anecdotage if it was needed.
The skills shortage has been evident within IBM for several years now. I was TUPEd in from Equifax in 2003 to migrate the applications that we had migrated out of IBM two years before, back into IBM. I left after the job had been done because of the battle to get resources (trying to get time with a firewall team that had about three staff, all junior, trying to find AIX resources - yep, IBM has little or no permanent AIX staff in the UK, it seems) and then the news came that Global Services had a 'problem', so I took the jump and became a contractor. Only weeks after the Great Layoff of 2005, IBM were looking for contractors to fill the posts that had been cleared out - suddenly management realised that those engineers were need for something.
I would be up for that, even if it isn't our problem in Europe - yet.
Working on the assumption that the majority of software patents are speculative, why not create a website that pulls software patents from the USPO database, and encourages users to pick them apart. Prior art would have to be verifiable with documentary evidence and the intention would not to be challenge the patent in court but to render a challenge, and therefore the patent, worthless. Of course it's also possible that the reverse could happen, but history hasn't exactly proved that so far.
I have a mild Letterman habit. Will I be able to watch last night's show on Joost, or will I get a message saying that my IP address is outside the US and I am therefore unable to watch due to copyright and licensing restrictions? I know which one my money's on.
Seasoned readers may remember that when Netscape forked the code tree for the browser and made it open source, Wang, backed by Microsoft, sued for an alleged patent infringement. Mozilla.org put out a call for cases of prior art, received several hundred, and buried the case. If Microsoft is stupid enough to go ahead with a case for any of these so-called infringements, the chances are that every one will have prior art or one kind or another. Patents rarely stand up in court with the right amount of expert support.
They get their iPhone out
"Loooook... shiiinyyyy...." *waves in face*
The protocols are getting there, even to the point of phones working as mass storage devices with OS X (Sony Ericsson W810i - I almost cried with joy when I plugged it in and it just appeared on my desktop) so they will settle in the inevitable Betamax way...
I think you're underestimating how fast battery technology moves, and how fast systems decrease in size: when 3G phones first appeared in the UK they were like the brickphones of the early 90s, but now my 3G and WiFi enabled Nokia E61 is slightly wider than a regular phone and about as slim. Surfing using 3G or WiFi is a battery hog but mean time between charges is two to three days of occasional use. I also think that we are reaching the limits of the size of the phone and personal device now for reasons of usability, and that they could go one of two ways: the truly personal device that will be a pocket sized 'candybar' like the iPhone that provides a big chunk of memory for storage and apps to retrieve that storage, or a terminal device that acts as a portal to externally stored data and applications that are paid for by subscription. Either way, this device could plug into a home system to provide different user interfaces for work and play. It sounds too straightforward even as I'm writing it but look at the way in which personal computing has changed in the last ten years and consider the personal applications that have evolved since then.
The OpenSolaris DVD I got the other day contains three, so they're on their way.
I suppose the ultimate expression of the Chinese attitude to copyright is the vast piles of Mao related tat that can be found in street markets in the big cities. A friend went to Guangzhou on a business trip a few weeks ago and came back with 'Zippo' lighters engraved with pictures of Mao. Some of it is genuine and regarded as collectible but it gets buried under cheap(er) knock-offs and genuinely odd things like Mao lava lamps and clockwork marching Maos (like those weeble sort of things - I saw these in a night market in Mong Kok, Hong Kong).
Microsoft wants its monopoly, end of. When Bill 'bet the company' on the Internet in 1995 he (or his advisors) saw that the browser was going to be the main portal. Prior to IE, MS was concentrating on the 'walled garden' approach like AOL - it's easy to forget that MSN has been around for longer than IE. IE has evolved from being a licensed afterthought to being part of the OS.
There was an article here last week where someone replied that they liked IE because of the ways it could communicate with the outside world using ActiveX. Personally, I think that that approach remains dangerous and irresponsible and that a web browser is a web browser, but MS have taken the approach that it should be able to do more, and while they are not imposing this approach on third parties a choice remains available to the user.
...so long as NASA gets the film rights.
Hmm, yes, I think I can sing that:
#Boo hoo, Linux won't share driver documentation with us, boo hoo boo hoo#
The last paragraph in the left hand column on that page is frankly nonsense. Linux has more driver support because there are more people working on driver support. I would like to see evidence of any kind that the OpenBSD community has been refused driver documentation which has been given to the Linux community.
I'm not sure about overseas sales, haven't been since the announcement. Compared to Nokia's current flagship phone, the N95, the iPhone looks pretty weak. It's possible that things will change before release but while the closed system will help Apple's support overheads it restricts access to logical extensions of the system like Skype and other VoIP systems and Blackberry and Blackberry-style email systems, possibly at the behest of Cingular. My Nokia E61 from T-Mobile does Skype and VoIP over 3G as well as WLAN, but only because Symbian 60 is an open platform. But that's where the iPhone has to be to truly compete. I'm a Mac user and Unix bigot but I'm not going to consider the iPhone if and when it gets to the UK unless it can so what my E61 does now.
Dude, shut up.
Bill
Ballmer's job seems to be to cast aspersions on any IT company that might be encroaching on Microsoft's world in the hope that people will pay attention, whereas it just looks like fear and loathing. Cool dance moves though.
I was talking to a friend who is a very casual PC user the other day and she told me that she had just had Ubuntu installed on her machine by her pet IT guy because she was concerned about the amount of spying that Windows did. She probably had a hooky install of Vista, but that's by the by, and it's a concern that I've seen both with XP since Genuine Advantage was enforced and with Vista.
The big sell for me is replacing Microsoft software - if I have to use Windows (and as a contractor this isn't a matter of choice - it's often down to my employer's IT policy as it is now) I try and employ as many non-MS products as possible, using PortableApps if necessary, which replaces IE with Firefox, MSN with Gaim, MSOffice with OpenOffice etc etc. I wouldn't say that these apps are 'better', just that they're better for me, although when demonstrating to other people, the price tag is a help too.
The issue behind Dell's lag in adopting a Linux distribution has rested on the ability to support it. The market for commercially supported distributions pretty much amounted to Red Hat until Ubuntu 6.06 and LTS came along, so the commitment is there. While Ubuntu is about the best desktop at the moment, the server market is where the business is at and presumbably Canonical will commit to that by distributing 6.06 and LTS.
I'm old enough and daft enough to remember the changes in the 'best' Linux desktop - RedHat gave way to Mandrake, which went to Fedora, which then changed to Ubuntu. Ubuntu is certainly the most fully featured ever, the easiest to use and pretty well supported, but I agree, the six month release cycle seems to have tripped up with 7.04 - things that worked previously have now stopped working, and not due to the Restricted Devices Manager - some badly supported wireless cards in my case, but ones that I had working with a little tinkering in the last couple of releases. Similar things happened with Mandrake when v10 came out: scripts stopped working, installs just didn't work on the laptop that I installed it on - the experience was replicated with little or no support and, as far as I could tell, users just moved away. I hope Canonical learns from the experiences of the past and keeps the spirit of an OS that 'just works' for most against the pressures of creeping featurism.
Mastercard were the official credit card and tickets and souvenirs from official shops and sites could only be bought with Mastercard. Just wait until McDonalds twig to that one...
Hmm, suddenly I realise what next year's real April 1st product will be.
They're just not trying hard enough