me: Market-share does not define a monopoly in the "new economy"
phutureboy: This actually is a good point..
A new definition of the term 'monopoly' due to the 'new' economy may be a good point, but in a report that, as one of its main points, condemns Judge Jackson's legal reasoning as being innovative and not being on solid ground because it has no legal precedent, it is somewhat hypocritical to then introduce an innovative new definition for monopoly that has no legal precedent.
It took me fifteen minutes to find those 52,000 programs.
I find it highly likely that if casual information gathering can find that many in fifteen minutes, that full fledged research would turn up a considerably larger number.
I'd also wager that vertical Windows apps alone number higher than 70k. For example, at the company I'm onsight at, we have more than twenty different vertical apps with Windows only clients that we sell to clients plus an in-house time reporting system based on Windows and an in-house project management system based on Windows. I'm sure that there is more that I am not aware since I'm just a grunt programmer.
How many large IT companies that produce vertical apps are there? I'd wager the number is at least in the tens of thousands.
Here's my summary of some of the points from the report:
Point One: Microsoft doesn't act like a Monopoly.
Point Two: The definition of the Market that Judge Jackson used was overly narrow because Sun, Apple, and Redhat don't make operating systems for non-networked intel compatible PC's.
Point Three: There are no 'staying costs' for sticking with Microsoft Windows.
Point Four: Market-share does not define a monopoly in the "new economy"
Don't take my word for it, read it for yourselves, its very poorly reasoned and uses the same types of arguments that it claims are bad when Judge Jackson used them.
Walnut Creek also sells this set with 2,500+ games. [Note this set includes games for Windows, DOS, and OS/2 and likely has some overlap with the previous set of disks.]
Symantec anti-virus informs me that:
There are more than 10,000 known viruses.
On my Windows NT workstation[1]:
[abimer]/> find / -print | grep -i \.exe | wc -l
1764
[abimer]/> find / -print | grep -i \.com | wc -l
2127
I haven't even started on vertical apps that never get mass-marketed.
I don't think that 70k Windows programs is likely to be an over-estimate, its more likely to be an under-estimate. Given that in ten minutes of looking I identified some 3,000 titles that were over-looked by McKenzie, and that he complete ignored the vertical app market (where by some estimates 90% of programmers are employed), I don't think the number is high enough.
[1] I have the cyg-win toolkit installed. I don't have a choice in running NT for a workstation.
Mr. McKenzie draws a different lesson. Because there are actually only a few
crucial programs used by most PC users -- like Microsoft Office -- the
company's applications business, he said, should be vulnerable to a program
like StarOffice, which is being distributed free by Sun Microsystems.
This cracks me up. Because there are so few applications available for Windows, Microsofts monopoly on desktop productivity software (MS Office) is vulerable to losing marketshare to a no-cost productivity suite.
In other words, MS isn't a monopoly because their product that cost hundreds of dollars per license might lost marketshare to a competeing product that costs $0.
Can someone explain this to me in a way that makes sense?
XNormal's post is Excellent!! I wish I had moderator points to mod it up!.
Of course bear in mind, that just because the web server for the front page has been migrated to IIS, it doesn't necessarily follow that the entire system has been migrated to MS products.
AFAIK, IIS can call cgi scripts from another system to load a frame, or use a non-MS ODBC or other database call to get data.
AntiBasic writes "This article over at InfoWorld [my emphasis]
I wonder if AntiBasic and the editors at/. know and understand that Robert X. Cringely's column at Infoworld is nothing more than a gossip column. I'd hardly qualify it as an article. Might as well make it a/. headline, though, gotta keep pace with those Mac rumors that are actually jokes.
The only think we can be halfway assured of (and only halfway at that) from one of the Cringely columns is that some anonymous people that claimed to have worked at MS claim that some systems are *nix driven via email to Cringely. Yup, there's some breaking new for you. Anonymous ex-employees have gripes about MS products.
I don't really expect/. to be news par excellence, but many stories lately might as well come out of the Weekly World News.
I can't wait for K5 to come back online next month.
SOCOG was ordered to make changes to its website before the Olympics start after the Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission upheld a complaint against the site by a blind man today.
Bruce Maguire lodged the complaint because large parts of the site were inaccessible to blind people.
The commission today ruled in Mr Maguire's favor and ordered SOCOG to make changes to its website before September 15.
It found SOCOG had breached the Disability Discrimination Act and has ordered it to use ALT text on all images and image map links on its site.
[my emphasis]
What he have here is the finding that SOCOG's web sight breached one of the law's of Australia. Hence, IBM, as part of due diligence in their bid for designing the site, should have taken accessibility into consideration. Hence, my opinion that the retrofit to make the site comply with the law should come out of IBM's pocket.
Web designers are responsible for knowing the laws that impact their craft, just as plumbers and electricians are responsible for knowing building regulations.
What you are saying is that if I contract with a building firm for a new house, unless I specify in the contract the house doesn't have to comply with the building code for my area of residence?
I'd like to think that the wires will comply with electrical code whether or not I put it in writing, and that the plumbing will meet the plumbing code whether I put it in writing or not.
Design firms are responsible for finding and understanding applicable law. This is usually known by the name 'due diligence' and is not an incredibly new concept.
This is the exact same situation, not only is the ALT tag reccomended by the standard, its quite likely that making the web site accessible to non-sighted people is the law in Australia (otherwise there would be no lawsuit).
Given the presentation that IBM makes of its solutions (being professional) I think that they deserve to lose money on this one. If IBM had intentionally made the sight viewable by IE only, there would be screaming from virtually everyone at slashdot. Systemically overlooking people with eye problems is something that should never happen from a 'professional' web-designer.
Over an 18-month period, a team of 10 volunteers vetted OpenBSD's entire source
code - all 350 megabytes - weeding out thousands of bugs.
10 programmers, working every day for 18 months would have to audit over 65k of source per day to reach 350 megabytes. My guess that on average, 65k of source would end up being about 1800 lines of code.
I wonder (a) how much of that is in comments and (b) if perhaps some portions do not need to be audited.
"The problem is that even if what they offer is 90 percent healthy and only 10 percent rat poison, the rat poison is still going to kill you," said Scott Hebner, director of e-business marketing at the IBM Software Group.
Holy Cripes! That could have come straight from the mouth of RMS himself! Who would have ever guessed that a corporate behemoth like big blue could start to grok the true advantages of open source?
Hebner said that should Microsoft gain the acceptance of a major industry-standards body such as the European Computer Manufacturers' Association for its forthcoming C# initiative, IBM would likely place support for C# on a par with Java given Sun's reluctance to make Java a truly open standard.
Now this has got to have both MS and Sun singing the blues. IBM, who currently has the fastest and best java implementation is promising to back C# if it gains status as an international standard. Ouch. Sun would lose its biggest ally on the Java front and MS would see its next attempt at world domination spinning out of Bill G's control.
And this is the part that really rocks my boat,
This point was reinforced in the most recent edition of the IBM annual report, in which company CEO and Chairman Lou Gerstner said that eliminating technology choke points is a key goal for the company.
Perhaps I need to go find a copy of the annual report, but it seems to me that Lou is stating that IBM wants to go full fledged open source to be a pure hardware + services company. I could be wrong, but I don't see what other technological choke points there could be....
KDE, after all, is European in origin and it looks like the main movers are still European. The development meetings are in Europe. On the other hand, Gnome has been associated with Red Hat for a long time.
First off, wasn't the last large Gnome development conference in France?
Second, one of the driving forces behind Gnome, Miguel, is certainly NOT employed by Redhat.
Third, the one part of Gnome that was indisputedly the pet project of a Redhat employee, Enlightenment, got ditched for another project more suited to Gnome, Sawfish.
Finally, given that most 'conferences' for both projects happen over the internet via email or irc, I don't think geocgraphy has anything to do with it.
Now, if some group in Asia put out a toolkit and users were mostly Asian or if a Russian group put out an environment and the users were mostly Serbian of one sort or the other, or something similiar, then I would take the ethnic/political/geographical differences seriously.
As it is, KDE is just as popular in the states as it is in Europe. Why else do so many stateside distributions (Caldera, Storm, Corel, Mandrake, etc.) ship KDE as the default?
I don't think that Sun is worried at all. For all of Linux's positives, it doesn't even begin to compete with Solaris on the type of big boxen that Sun likes to sell. Sure, Sun still sells workstations, but its been quite a while since the public has thought of Sun as a work station company. Sun's core business is big honking servers. When Linux begins to deal well with 64 CPU servers with Gigs and Gigs of ram, then Sun misght start to get worried (and Beowulf class clusters only count for a very limited domain of problems).
And even then, when Linux becomes the equal or superior to Solaris in every aspect, Sun will still not have anything to worry about because Linux will run on Sun's hardware, from whence the bulk of Sun's income comes from.
What Sun and HP are likely after is someone to do free work for them. Right now, its likely that both Sun and HP are spending a good deal on supporting and maintianing CDE. Moving to Gnome frees up a lot of resources people wise, time wise and money wise.
Further, if they sanction and support Gnome on their proprietary Unixes, all of a sudden it becomes much easier to run thousands of (currently) Linux only apps on HP/UX or Solaris. This is a wise move that could conceivably increase marketshare for workstations which are profitable for Sun, even if no longer their core business.
Just my two cents.... Eat them for what their worth.
For those of you that have fogotten, IBM demonstrated a PowerPC chip running at 1 Ghz way back in 1998 (the chip ran at 1 GHz when cooled to 25 degrees Celcius, at room temperature it ran just at just under 500 MHz). Check out CNET's take on the event: IBM joins the 1,000-MHz club.
The 1 Ghz PowerPC IBM demonstrated way back in 1998 was partially hand tooled. This chip broke many of the processes IBM uses to automate production of the PowerPC. Check outwhat the EE Times said about the chip at the time: IBM's 1-GHz processor taxes current EDA tools.
IBM intends to have out 700MHz PowerPCs for its RS/6000 line by early next year for its RS/6000 line. It would make very little sense for Apple to not start shoving these into new Macs when they become available.
IBM has had very little trouble scaling the PPC up as it needs to for its line of servers. I really wonder why Motorola seems to be having so much trouble in the MHz race.
OTOH, I remember 3rd party benchmarks that showed a Motorola PPC at 350 MHz smoking an Intel x86 at 500 MHz at Photoshop. And this was back in the day when x86 had MMX and PPC had no Alti-vec. FYI, the MMX instructions allowed the Intel box (running NT) to perform one or two tests slightly faster than the Apple box running Mac OS. Given this type of history, I can see Motorola being arrogant enough to think it doesn't need to keep up the MHz. But its time for Motorola to wake up and smell the coffee.
On a related note, there is a rumor that Palm is going to drop the 68k Motorola series in favor of the StrongARM series mostly because of the MHz.
Motorola better get some MHz action in a hurry. Despite an overall faster chip, eventually a double/triple clock speed advantage will catch up. I doubt a 1GHz T-Bird does much slower than a.5 GHz PPC, especially given Apple's slower bus.
dangers (remember the internet worm...)
on
Techno Jacket
·
· Score: 1
Disadvantages of the jackets include the possible implications of network crashes and the effects of rainstorms on techno-clothing while being worn.
I think they missed all the real dangers...
back orifice
trojans
root exploits
melissa type worms
The primative prototypes are not likely to be very dangerous, but if we get a real net-jacket with a wireless, always on i-net connection and some useful ware on the clothes (smart card, digital signatures, quicken-on-the-go) I'd hate to be wearing one in the same neighborhood as the local script kiddie, let alone someone mischiveous with real skills....
The funny part is that I can see AOL pulling a boneheaded move in v7 or so when you install AOL for Windows, it reformats your hard disk and installs Linux. I can smell the resulting class action lawsuit already.
This is incredible news. Now I just have to find one of the 400 free hour disks, install AOLinux and remember to call up the service center at the end of every month:
me: I'd like to cancel my service. AOL: Is there anything we can do to keep you as a customer? me: no. AOL: What if we gave you another free month? me: well, that might do it, sure, give me another 400 free hours and I'll stay.
How do we deal with the censorship issue ourselves, so that we can offer constructive solutions instead of ranting, raving, and otherwise having fun?
You can't. At present there is no meaningful way to censor the internet without losing valuable content. The very notion of 'censoring' is predicate on a fixed idea of what is and what is not appropriate. There is no computational method for finding isAppropriate(viewer, content).
On a side note, this automatic laundry (using smart-cards) is
located in South Central LA, and is in a very poor area where people haven't been exposed to the Net. How
do we go about quelling their fears about the Net?
You train them. Show them how to find recipes online.
When you set up the system, think like Larry Wall, make it easy to do the 'right' thing, but do not attempt to make it impossible to do the 'wrong' thing.
Put into place a monitoring sytem. Only give your smart cards to people over 18 years of age and put in a mechanism that allows any person to look at what sites the smart card has been charged to look at. Don't enforce limits, but make it possible for parents to enforce their own limits. Sure, a parent can give their kid a smart card to go do the wash or browse the internet, but the parent will have the option of reviewing just what their child had been looking at.
Enterprise Edition is ready to meet those requirements with a High Performance Compiler (HPC) for Java that maximizes the execution speed of your server code on OS/2, Windows NT, AIX, OS/400 and OS/390.
Slashdot Mirror
A new definition of the term 'monopoly' due to the 'new' economy may be a good point, but in a report that, as one of its main points, condemns Judge Jackson's legal reasoning as being innovative and not being on solid ground because it has no legal precedent, it is somewhat hypocritical to then introduce an innovative new definition for monopoly that has no legal precedent.
Buy me a copy and (assuming you don't have to have administrator privs to install it) I'll put it on my workstation. ;)
Thanks.
It took me fifteen minutes to find those 52,000 programs.
I find it highly likely that if casual information gathering can find that many in fifteen minutes, that full fledged research would turn up a considerably larger number.
I'd also wager that vertical Windows apps alone number higher than 70k. For example, at the company I'm onsight at, we have more than twenty different vertical apps with Windows only clients that we sell to clients plus an in-house time reporting system based on Windows and an in-house project management system based on Windows. I'm sure that there is more that I am not aware since I'm just a grunt programmer.
How many large IT companies that produce vertical apps are there? I'd wager the number is at least in the tens of thousands.
Here's my summary of some of the points from the report:
Don't take my word for it, read it for yourselves, its very poorly reasoned and uses the same types of arguments that it claims are bad when Judge Jackson used them.
Well, lets see here
[abimer]/> find / -print | grep -i \.exe | wc -l
1764
[abimer]/> find / -print | grep -i \.com | wc -l
2127
I haven't even started on vertical apps that never get mass-marketed.
I don't think that 70k Windows programs is likely to be an over-estimate, its more likely to be an under-estimate. Given that in ten minutes of looking I identified some 3,000 titles that were over-looked by McKenzie, and that he complete ignored the vertical app market (where by some estimates 90% of programmers are employed), I don't think the number is high enough.
[1] I have the cyg-win toolkit installed. I don't have a choice in running NT for a workstation.
This cracks me up. Because there are so few applications available for Windows, Microsofts monopoly on desktop productivity software (MS Office) is vulerable to losing marketshare to a no-cost productivity suite.
In other words, MS isn't a monopoly because their product that cost hundreds of dollars per license might lost marketshare to a competeing product that costs $0.
Can someone explain this to me in a way that makes sense?
XNormal's post is Excellent!! I wish I had moderator points to mod it up!.
Of course bear in mind, that just because the web server for the front page has been migrated to IIS, it doesn't necessarily follow that the entire system has been migrated to MS products.
AFAIK, IIS can call cgi scripts from another system to load a frame, or use a non-MS ODBC or other database call to get data.
I wonder if AntiBasic and the editors at /. know and understand that Robert X. Cringely's column at Infoworld is nothing more than a gossip column. I'd hardly qualify it as an article. Might as well make it a /. headline, though, gotta keep pace with those Mac rumors that are actually jokes.
The only think we can be halfway assured of (and only halfway at that) from one of the Cringely columns is that some anonymous people that claimed to have worked at MS claim that some systems are *nix driven via email to Cringely. Yup, there's some breaking new for you. Anonymous ex-employees have gripes about MS products.
I don't really expect /. to be news par excellence, but many stories lately might as well come out of the Weekly World News.
I can't wait for K5 to come back online next month.
boy case opined:
Let's go back and look at the article.
What he have here is the finding that SOCOG's web sight breached one of the law's of Australia. Hence, IBM, as part of due diligence in their bid for designing the site, should have taken accessibility into consideration. Hence, my opinion that the retrofit to make the site comply with the law should come out of IBM's pocket.
Web designers are responsible for knowing the laws that impact their craft, just as plumbers and electricians are responsible for knowing building regulations.
What you are saying is that if I contract with a building firm for a new house, unless I specify in the contract the house doesn't have to comply with the building code for my area of residence?
I'd like to think that the wires will comply with electrical code whether or not I put it in writing, and that the plumbing will meet the plumbing code whether I put it in writing or not.
Design firms are responsible for finding and understanding applicable law. This is usually known by the name 'due diligence' and is not an incredibly new concept.
This is the exact same situation, not only is the ALT tag reccomended by the standard, its quite likely that making the web site accessible to non-sighted people is the law in Australia (otherwise there would be no lawsuit).
Given the presentation that IBM makes of its solutions (being professional) I think that they deserve to lose money on this one. If IBM had intentionally made the sight viewable by IE only, there would be screaming from virtually everyone at slashdot. Systemically overlooking people with eye problems is something that should never happen from a 'professional' web-designer.
10 programmers, working every day for 18 months would have to audit over 65k of source per day to reach 350 megabytes. My guess that on average, 65k of source would end up being about 1800 lines of code.
I wonder (a) how much of that is in comments and (b) if perhaps some portions do not need to be audited.
Holy Cripes! That could have come straight from the mouth of RMS himself! Who would have ever guessed that a corporate behemoth like big blue could start to grok the true advantages of open source?
Now this has got to have both MS and Sun singing the blues. IBM, who currently has the fastest and best java implementation is promising to back C# if it gains status as an international standard. Ouch. Sun would lose its biggest ally on the Java front and MS would see its next attempt at world domination spinning out of Bill G's control.
And this is the part that really rocks my boat,
Perhaps I need to go find a copy of the annual report, but it seems to me that Lou is stating that IBM wants to go full fledged open source to be a pure hardware + services company. I could be wrong, but I don't see what other technological choke points there could be....
Well, Well, Well was written by John Lennon.
Oh, well...
KDE, after all, is European in origin and it looks like the main movers are still European. The development meetings are in Europe. On the other hand, Gnome has been associated with Red Hat for a long time.
First off, wasn't the last large Gnome development conference in France?
Second, one of the driving forces behind Gnome, Miguel, is certainly NOT employed by Redhat.
Third, the one part of Gnome that was indisputedly the pet project of a Redhat employee, Enlightenment, got ditched for another project more suited to Gnome, Sawfish.
Finally, given that most 'conferences' for both projects happen over the internet via email or irc, I don't think geocgraphy has anything to do with it.
Now, if some group in Asia put out a toolkit and users were mostly Asian or if a Russian group put out an environment and the users were mostly Serbian of one sort or the other, or something similiar, then I would take the ethnic/political/geographical differences seriously.
As it is, KDE is just as popular in the states as it is in Europe. Why else do so many stateside distributions (Caldera, Storm, Corel, Mandrake, etc.) ship KDE as the default?
I don't think that Sun is worried at all. For all of Linux's positives, it doesn't even begin to compete with Solaris on the type of big boxen that Sun likes to sell. Sure, Sun still sells workstations, but its been quite a while since the public has thought of Sun as a work station company. Sun's core business is big honking servers. When Linux begins to deal well with 64 CPU servers with Gigs and Gigs of ram, then Sun misght start to get worried (and Beowulf class clusters only count for a very limited domain of problems).
And even then, when Linux becomes the equal or superior to Solaris in every aspect, Sun will still not have anything to worry about because Linux will run on Sun's hardware, from whence the bulk of Sun's income comes from.
What Sun and HP are likely after is someone to do free work for them. Right now, its likely that both Sun and HP are spending a good deal on supporting and maintianing CDE. Moving to Gnome frees up a lot of resources people wise, time wise and money wise.
Further, if they sanction and support Gnome on their proprietary Unixes, all of a sudden it becomes much easier to run thousands of (currently) Linux only apps on HP/UX or Solaris. This is a wise move that could conceivably increase marketshare for workstations which are profitable for Sun, even if no longer their core business.
Just my two cents.... Eat them for what their worth.
For those of you that have fogotten, IBM demonstrated a PowerPC chip running at 1 Ghz way back in 1998 (the chip ran at 1 GHz when cooled to 25 degrees Celcius, at room temperature it ran just at just under 500 MHz). Check out CNET's take on the event: IBM joins the 1,000-MHz club.
The 1 Ghz PowerPC IBM demonstrated way back in 1998 was partially hand tooled. This chip broke many of the processes IBM uses to automate production of the PowerPC. Check outwhat the EE Times said about the chip at the time: IBM's 1-GHz processor taxes current EDA tools.
More recently, TechWeb states some of IBM's plans for the PowerPC: IBM Preps SOI-Based PowerPCs.
To see what is available today, and what is coming in the short term future, look at IBM's product page for the PowerPC at: http://www.chips.ibm.com/products/powerp c/.
IBM intends to have out 700MHz PowerPCs for its RS/6000 line by early next year for its RS/6000 line. It would make very little sense for Apple to not start shoving these into new Macs when they become available.
IBM has had very little trouble scaling the PPC up as it needs to for its line of servers. I really wonder why Motorola seems to be having so much trouble in the MHz race.
OTOH, I remember 3rd party benchmarks that showed a Motorola PPC at 350 MHz smoking an Intel x86 at 500 MHz at Photoshop. And this was back in the day when x86 had MMX and PPC had no Alti-vec. FYI, the MMX instructions allowed the Intel box (running NT) to perform one or two tests slightly faster than the Apple box running Mac OS. Given this type of history, I can see Motorola being arrogant enough to think it doesn't need to keep up the MHz. But its time for Motorola to wake up and smell the coffee.
On a related note, there is a rumor that Palm is going to drop the 68k Motorola series in favor of the StrongARM series mostly because of the MHz.
Motorola better get some MHz action in a hurry. Despite an overall faster chip, eventually a double/triple clock speed advantage will catch up. I doubt a 1GHz T-Bird does much slower than a .5 GHz PPC, especially given Apple's slower bus.
I think they missed all the real dangers...
The primative prototypes are not likely to be very dangerous, but if we get a real net-jacket with a wireless, always on i-net connection and some useful ware on the clothes (smart card, digital signatures, quicken-on-the-go) I'd hate to be wearing one in the same neighborhood as the local script kiddie, let alone someone mischiveous with real skills....
They can likely even trademark that.
The funny part is that I can see AOL pulling a boneheaded move in v7 or so when you install AOL for Windows, it reformats your hard disk and installs Linux. I can smell the resulting class action lawsuit already.
This is incredible news. Now I just have to find one of the 400 free hour disks, install AOLinux and remember to call up the service center at the end of every month:
I know one has to pay through the nose for QT on Windows. I would assume that the same is true for non-free *nix?
If this is the case, then Gnome is a no-brainer...
Get more info here.
In all seriousness, if you've never heard of George Clinton, the above link will give you an idea of who he is, even if it is satire.
You can't. At present there is no meaningful way to censor the internet without losing valuable content. The very notion of 'censoring' is predicate on a fixed idea of what is and what is not appropriate. There is no computational method for finding isAppropriate(viewer, content).
Apparently the technology behind SuperCede was folded into Instantians' JOVE product.
Anyway, native compilers are out there...
IBM's Visual Age for Java Enterprise Edition supports native compilation for server side Java.
From the above page:
I would say that a man who apparently abused his position of power to engage in sex with his involuntary servants was peevish and adolescent.
I would also say that a man who stated that all people should be free and still owned slaves was peevish and adolescent.
I would say that a man as obviously bright and inspired as Thomas Jefferson who died bankrupt and in debt was peevish and adolescent.