They are not adding any value, which brings me back to a point I drilled in my previous post. That is all that matters to the market. Just rebranding it and offering essentially the same product does not accomplish this. If they did not want to innovate or offer anything fundamentally superior to RedHat, it would have been better for all parties involved (the two companies and their customers) if they created a partnership. I think it is not hard to see the benefits of that. Instead of a single outstanding offering, we have one good (RedHat) and one mediocre (Oracle).
Yesterday I suggested Oracle entering the game would be good for the market by increasing competion among Linux vendors. Looking at this offering, I have to say: what a joke. I was completely wrong.
Oracle are pulling nothing more than a publicity stunt with this. I expect I would be correct in the speculation that some marketing executive asked some developers to slap together an “Oracle branded distribution”. They then took a release of Fedora Core and changed graphics and colors. Boom! Instant industry player.
I wince when I see such nonsense because I know it will sell units.
“Freebies”, that cost a few dollars in manufacturing and material costs, are being used to promote players that actually cost under a hundred dollars, but are priced at hundreds (if not close to a thousand) dollars. (Everyone remember when your average DVD players were priced at $500 and higher? Now they can be bought for $25-50 a pop. Simple reasoning tells us the same applies here.)
All in the name of a senseless format war where neither side offers anything compelling over the other, where the end result will be a market full of players that read both.
I recall stories of cheerleaders from my highschool making brownies with laxative mixed in and sending them to the cheerleaders of a rival school. Maybe this is a similar gesture? I would hope, at least, the cake was magical.
Yes, of course, that is all correct and far be it for me to doubt or deny freedom of speech. I failed to put my words together rightly in trying to determine if there is a comparison between writing a weblog that disparaged people of a certain race and shouting “fire”. We do, in certain contexts, ban both of them. In the former case because it infringes upon liberty and in the latter because it potentially infringes upon life. What is the proper response to the former however? What constitutes hate speech is not always clear and banning it might even start us down a slipper slope. (Is disapproval of Bush policy in Iraq considered “hate speech”?) Also, there is not a certain irony in using rights protected by the Constitution (or any similar legal document) to infringe upon the rights of those around you? Should those actions be stopped?
Public hate speech has no more protection under freedom of speech laws (or their analogue) than shouting “fire!” in a crowded theater. That is, if what you are saying is designed to forcibly infringe upon the rights of others, it should not be guarded. However, these weblogs are not similar to the aforementioned example in that nobody is being unwillfully subjected to their messages. Is that definitive enough to determine that these weblogs should not be removed?
PostgreSQL and MySQL run just as fine on Windows as they do on Linux, as does Apache and anything else you might need to build applications. Windows offers LAMP without the L. Compilers and development environments are even more prolific with Cygwin and just about every Java development tool and application platform running just as well. I cannot speak about the artificial number of connections (I am not even sure what you mean), but it is not sufficient to say Linux has an edge because it has more software.
This is just a little fan on the flames to convince hold-outs (as others have correctly indicated in this thread). Once Vista begins shipping, it will be installed ubiquitously on nearly all comodity machines and the influence on the bottom line of the cost will be, for the most part, unaffected.
This is what open source proponents and contributors fail to get: it is not about what RedHat give to the community or any other charitable work they do. Potential customers do not look at RedHat offerings and buy their product because they enhanced the kernel or fixed bugs in this project or another.
Yes, it is important, but it does not drive their business nor does it drive adoption. What matters is value. Does RedHat offer everything Microsoft does? No. Is the comparable functionality their proprietary distribution as easy to deploy and implement as with Windows? Positively not. Is it less expensive? Hardly. Is the expertise as ubiquitous? Unimaginable.
Nothing in open source lets your administer fleets of machines from a single console. (NIS? LDAP? NFS? Give me a break. Unrefined raw materials are insufficient to large-scale demands.) Although RedHat are trying (JBoss aquisition), nothing in open source provides a complete operating system to application stack for the enterprise as Microsoft does right now. Customers in the IT sector buy because it lets them do more with less, and make no mistake: that ain't RedHat right now.
There seems to be an overwhelming attitude that open source is superior to proprietary alternatives in every respect. This has been true for a time, but before we realize it, we will all be rushing to play “catch-up” again. RedHat have been, as far as major potential customers are concerned, quiet and inert.
But of course, what can they do? Open source on a whole has lagged behind and they can hardly do enough to keep up the pace with advances from their competitors.
That is why we need more players in this space with deep pockets like Oracle.
Diary of a CMU CS Student (out of mothballs)
on
Fedora Core 6 Review
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
This past year, I was accepted into Carnegie Mellon's [cmu.edu] School of Computer Science [cmu.edu]. It has been a remarkable experience that I would lik
e to share with the Slashdot community. Here's an account of my experience.
Week 1, Sunday: I moved in today. My roommate, a sophomore CS student, had already moved in tw
o days before me. The floor is already completely covered with garbage. He also smells. I think he
might be gay too. He's already asked me if I like the color he painted his toenails. This should be
interesting. I am almost completely settled in. Techno music is playing in every room in every floor
of my dorm. There are computers and other types of trash out in the common areas. What a mess. Tom
orrow, I am going to go sign up to get my network connection.
Week 1, Monday: I got hooked up to the CMU network today! I jacked into the network, only to f
ind that the hostname and address assigned to me were colliding with another system. I'll just increm
ent the network numbers a few times. I am really eager to get on.
Week 1, Tuesday: I am still looking for a free IP address. Can't anybody here properly configu
re their systems?
Week 1, Friday: I finally found a free IP! It's mine! You sons of bitches can't have i
t, I found it, I keep it, it's mine! To hell with all of you! Head hurts really bad. I've slowly be
en developing a headache since I first arrived. Everywhere I look there are these Lucent Technologies
wireless access points. I wonder if that's the problem.
Week 1, Saturday: I sat down at my computer today. My desktop wall paper is now the goatse.cx
guy. Pleasant. Scattered over every directory on my C: drive are thousands, possibly millions, of fi
les titled "J00AR30WN3DBITCH-phj33r-" and then some random hacker's name. Don't these people have liv
es? Maybe they need laid or something. It'd take days to clean this out. I mentioned to my roommate
that I needed to reinstall Windows, and immediately he jumped up and shouted: "NO! Do NOT use Window
s!" Suddenly, two dozen other guys (all of them possibly homosexuals) appeared at the door, each tout
ing an operating system called Linux. Half of them got into a fight over which was better, Debian, Re
dHat, Slackware, and a bunch of others I couldn't recognize. Some kid who appeared to not have shower
ed since he was born was touting "Linux From Scratch", saying that only losers used pre-made distros.
A crowd of people in the back kept quiet about how I'd be sorry if I used Linux instead of BSD on the
network. Who the fuck are these people? Classes start next week. Hope I have my computer working s
o I can do my assignments.
Week 3, Friday: People are still trying to get Linux to work on my system. They keep telling m
y that my hardware sucks. We go through about four or five distributions a day. Every now and then,
I notice a little devil on my screen. Stickers for every of these distributions have been plastered o
n my case. Suddenly, my room stinks a lot more with these people in here. I ask them why they never
shower, and the usual response is something along the lines of "showering is like rebooting" and "I do
n't want to lose my uptime."
Week 3, Saturday: There's a troop of men running naked in a circle around McGill Hall. I am no
t even going to ask.
Week 4, Wednesday: Linux is FINALLY working on my computer! I have a pretty slick desktop too.
I think I might like this. I can finally work in my room instead of the labs, although considering
the every increasing layer of garbage on the floor...
Week 4, Thursday: My computer flashes messages about how I am "0WNX0RED" and how I should "PHJ3
3R" whoever and how "L4MEX0R" I am for having an insecure box. A kid suggests we reinstall Linux afte
r discovering about 17 rootkits.
I have not checked the prices of comparable RedHat and Microsoft server offerings. It turns out that RedHat is still cheaper, but by a trivial amount. Compare the RedHat Store (see: Server Operating System Products) and Windows Server 2003 R2 Pricing. (Wouldn't it be nice if Slashdot support post annotation or editing?)
At any rate, Windows might still be a superior server platform thanks to the effectiveness of ActiveDirectory, fine-grained ACL, and so on. I am no Windows apologist (on the contrary, quite the advocate of open source solutions), but I fear Microsoft may be leaping far ahead of their competition in this space.
RedHat is stagnant. I have to admit a degree of ignorance here, but as far as I can tell, they are not really doing anything to excite interest in their market. They offer support and their own distribution (apart from Fedora Core) at outrageously high prices. (Even Windows server solutions are cheaper than RedHat.) Sure they gobbled up JBoss, but I do not think there is as much market overlap as one might suspect.
I might even go so far as to say RedHat has done a fair amount of damage to Linux adoption: they create high costs and little value or innovation likely because they face no direct competition.
With Oracle entering the picture, RedHat will be compelled to move quickly—to at least do something. I am not even quite sure what that is, but one way or another, this is adds choice for the market and that is always good, whether it results in a better RedHat or no RedHat.
Not to nitpick excessively, but you could easily substitute portions of this article with terms like (and relating to) “Internet”, “personal computer”, “telephone”, “car”, and others. Asking ourselves if a technology is “real or science fiction” when it already exists (albiet in a primitive form) is silly. Of course it exists; the question itself cites examples. Perhaps the meaningful questions might be along the lines of: “what are the challenges associated with making it accurate?” or “what impact will facial recognition have on society?”
There needs to be a consistent negative response to technologies that inhibit fair usage of purchased media. Not only should hackers continue to find work-arounds that fix defects such as the inability to tranfer media between devices, consumers should regularly use them. Maybe it is optimistically naive, but I think over a long enough period, companies will eventually come to see the waste of deliberately breaking their products.
I am sure now we do not want SGI to make a come-back. People here have mentioned that they have made interesting products in the past, but now that they are unable to compete, they will become a purely litigious company. They could not and cannot keep up, so they are effectively determined to hold everyone else back. This is yet another example of a failed patent system defeating what is demonstrably productive market economics. SGI, when it was king of graphics, failed to deliver the substantial improvements in technology at better prices demanded by the market, so the market turned elsewhere. That is precisely what should happen and it does not matter who came up with those developments in the first place.
I just heard some sad news on talk radio - Sci Fi actor James Doohan, affectionately known as "Scotty", was found dead in his NC-1701 quarters this morning. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to popular culture. Truly a Federation icon.
What appears to be a Russian design company has on their website a keyboard in which the keys are using OLED to display what function the keys represent.
(Emphasis added.) This is an implementation detail in the absence of an implementation.
The product is Art. Lebedev Studio's Optimus Keyboard.
(Again, emphasis added.) There is no product. This is a concept.
So yes, I am correct. It does not matter what else the company does, the Slashdot article still presents it as an implemented product, at first. At the very least, the post is contradictory.
They're renderings. I don't think they've decided on the exact technology yet for displaying the images in the keys. Funny how someone's art project (although really cool) gets presented on/. like it's a product.
If you would like to see legal action like this stop, why not drop some change to someone who might fight back? Perhaps if enough financial support appears, the site's maintainer might actually be willing to challenge this.
Remember: we will always lose to the corporations if we fail to put our words into action. In most of these situations, action means money.
On behalf of Hasbro, we therefore demand that you provide us with prompt written assurance that you will dismantle the e-Scrabble website and not publish or distribute the game referenced above, or any other game using elements of the SCRABBLE crossword game, in the United States and Canada without Hasbros permission. Because the e-Scrabble URL is of no use to you, it should be transferred to Hasbro. We also demand that you provide us with information concerning the extent of your uses of any elements of the SCRABBLE game, as well as information regarding the distribution of your electronic Scrabble game to enable us to assess more precisely the extent of the damage done.
Does reading something like this make anyone else here sick to the stomach? The basic premis here is that Hasbro assumes people are too stupid to tell the difference between a knock-off and the original. And for that reason, this person's work has to be destroyed. Furthermore, the part that really felt like a kick to me, this somehow makes the domain useless to the original owner and he must therefore hand it over to Hasbro. Meanwhile, this is all as if nobody ever thought of crossword puzzles before.
This nonsense will be the end of all progress in society as we know it. The only proper response to this travesty is for 100 similar scabble games to pop-up to replace this one. For each of those that get taken down, 100 more.
Slashdot Mirror
They are not adding any value, which brings me back to a point I drilled in my previous post. That is all that matters to the market. Just rebranding it and offering essentially the same product does not accomplish this. If they did not want to innovate or offer anything fundamentally superior to RedHat, it would have been better for all parties involved (the two companies and their customers) if they created a partnership. I think it is not hard to see the benefits of that. Instead of a single outstanding offering, we have one good (RedHat) and one mediocre (Oracle).
Yesterday I suggested Oracle entering the game would be good for the market by increasing competion among Linux vendors. Looking at this offering, I have to say: what a joke. I was completely wrong.
Oracle are pulling nothing more than a publicity stunt with this. I expect I would be correct in the speculation that some marketing executive asked some developers to slap together an “Oracle branded distribution”. They then took a release of Fedora Core and changed graphics and colors. Boom! Instant industry player.
According to the script the exact line is: “Kwyjibo. Uh... a big, dumb, balding North American ape. With no chin.”
“A, uh, big, dum, balding, North American ape.”
I wince when I see such nonsense because I know it will sell units.
“Freebies”, that cost a few dollars in manufacturing and material costs, are being used to promote players that actually cost under a hundred dollars, but are priced at hundreds (if not close to a thousand) dollars. (Everyone remember when your average DVD players were priced at $500 and higher? Now they can be bought for $25-50 a pop. Simple reasoning tells us the same applies here.)
All in the name of a senseless format war where neither side offers anything compelling over the other, where the end result will be a market full of players that read both.
This is outright stupid.
I recall stories of cheerleaders from my highschool making brownies with laxative mixed in and sending them to the cheerleaders of a rival school. Maybe this is a similar gesture? I would hope, at least, the cake was magical .
Funny, but I think Penny-Arcade got it right a while back. Their style, in this instance, ought to be emulated.
Yes, of course, that is all correct and far be it for me to doubt or deny freedom of speech. I failed to put my words together rightly in trying to determine if there is a comparison between writing a weblog that disparaged people of a certain race and shouting “fire”. We do, in certain contexts, ban both of them. In the former case because it infringes upon liberty and in the latter because it potentially infringes upon life. What is the proper response to the former however? What constitutes hate speech is not always clear and banning it might even start us down a slipper slope. (Is disapproval of Bush policy in Iraq considered “hate speech”?) Also, there is not a certain irony in using rights protected by the Constitution (or any similar legal document) to infringe upon the rights of those around you? Should those actions be stopped?
Public hate speech has no more protection under freedom of speech laws (or their analogue) than shouting “fire!” in a crowded theater. That is, if what you are saying is designed to forcibly infringe upon the rights of others, it should not be guarded. However, these weblogs are not similar to the aforementioned example in that nobody is being unwillfully subjected to their messages. Is that definitive enough to determine that these weblogs should not be removed?
PostgreSQL and MySQL run just as fine on Windows as they do on Linux, as does Apache and anything else you might need to build applications. Windows offers LAMP without the L. Compilers and development environments are even more prolific with Cygwin and just about every Java development tool and application platform running just as well. I cannot speak about the artificial number of connections (I am not even sure what you mean), but it is not sufficient to say Linux has an edge because it has more software.
This is just a little fan on the flames to convince hold-outs (as others have correctly indicated in this thread). Once Vista begins shipping, it will be installed ubiquitously on nearly all comodity machines and the influence on the bottom line of the cost will be, for the most part, unaffected.
Perhaps edits to the content forfeit moderation whereas annotations leave it unaffected?
Excellent, ad hominem.
This is what open source proponents and contributors fail to get: it is not about what RedHat give to the community or any other charitable work they do. Potential customers do not look at RedHat offerings and buy their product because they enhanced the kernel or fixed bugs in this project or another.
Yes, it is important, but it does not drive their business nor does it drive adoption. What matters is value. Does RedHat offer everything Microsoft does? No. Is the comparable functionality their proprietary distribution as easy to deploy and implement as with Windows? Positively not. Is it less expensive? Hardly. Is the expertise as ubiquitous? Unimaginable.
Nothing in open source lets your administer fleets of machines from a single console. (NIS? LDAP? NFS? Give me a break. Unrefined raw materials are insufficient to large-scale demands.) Although RedHat are trying (JBoss aquisition), nothing in open source provides a complete operating system to application stack for the enterprise as Microsoft does right now. Customers in the IT sector buy because it lets them do more with less, and make no mistake: that ain't RedHat right now.
There seems to be an overwhelming attitude that open source is superior to proprietary alternatives in every respect. This has been true for a time, but before we realize it, we will all be rushing to play “catch-up” again. RedHat have been, as far as major potential customers are concerned, quiet and inert.
But of course, what can they do? Open source on a whole has lagged behind and they can hardly do enough to keep up the pace with advances from their competitors.
That is why we need more players in this space with deep pockets like Oracle.
This past year, I was accepted into Carnegie Mellon's [cmu.edu] School of Computer Science [cmu.edu]. It has been a remarkable experience that I would lik e to share with the Slashdot community. Here's an account of my experience.
Week 1, Sunday: I moved in today. My roommate, a sophomore CS student, had already moved in tw o days before me. The floor is already completely covered with garbage. He also smells. I think he might be gay too. He's already asked me if I like the color he painted his toenails. This should be interesting. I am almost completely settled in. Techno music is playing in every room in every floor of my dorm. There are computers and other types of trash out in the common areas. What a mess. Tom orrow, I am going to go sign up to get my network connection.
Week 1, Monday: I got hooked up to the CMU network today! I jacked into the network, only to f ind that the hostname and address assigned to me were colliding with another system. I'll just increm ent the network numbers a few times. I am really eager to get on.
Week 1, Tuesday: I am still looking for a free IP address. Can't anybody here properly configu re their systems?
Week 1, Friday: I finally found a free IP! It's mine! You sons of bitches can't have i t, I found it, I keep it, it's mine! To hell with all of you! Head hurts really bad. I've slowly be en developing a headache since I first arrived. Everywhere I look there are these Lucent Technologies wireless access points. I wonder if that's the problem.
Week 1, Saturday: I sat down at my computer today. My desktop wall paper is now the goatse.cx guy. Pleasant. Scattered over every directory on my C: drive are thousands, possibly millions, of fi les titled "J00AR30WN3DBITCH-phj33r-" and then some random hacker's name. Don't these people have liv es? Maybe they need laid or something. It'd take days to clean this out. I mentioned to my roommate that I needed to reinstall Windows, and immediately he jumped up and shouted: "NO! Do NOT use Window s!" Suddenly, two dozen other guys (all of them possibly homosexuals) appeared at the door, each tout ing an operating system called Linux. Half of them got into a fight over which was better, Debian, Re dHat, Slackware, and a bunch of others I couldn't recognize. Some kid who appeared to not have shower ed since he was born was touting "Linux From Scratch", saying that only losers used pre-made distros. A crowd of people in the back kept quiet about how I'd be sorry if I used Linux instead of BSD on the network. Who the fuck are these people? Classes start next week. Hope I have my computer working s o I can do my assignments.
Week 3, Friday: People are still trying to get Linux to work on my system. They keep telling m y that my hardware sucks. We go through about four or five distributions a day. Every now and then, I notice a little devil on my screen. Stickers for every of these distributions have been plastered o n my case. Suddenly, my room stinks a lot more with these people in here. I ask them why they never shower, and the usual response is something along the lines of "showering is like rebooting" and "I do n't want to lose my uptime."
Week 3, Saturday: There's a troop of men running naked in a circle around McGill Hall. I am no t even going to ask.
Week 4, Wednesday: Linux is FINALLY working on my computer! I have a pretty slick desktop too. I think I might like this. I can finally work in my room instead of the labs, although considering the every increasing layer of garbage on the floor...
Week 4, Thursday: My computer flashes messages about how I am "0WNX0RED" and how I should "PHJ3 3R" whoever and how "L4MEX0R" I am for having an insecure box. A kid suggests we reinstall Linux afte r discovering about 17 rootkits.
Week 5, Friday: Someone got BSD work
I have not checked the prices of comparable RedHat and Microsoft server offerings. It turns out that RedHat is still cheaper, but by a trivial amount. Compare the RedHat Store (see: Server Operating System Products) and Windows Server 2003 R2 Pricing. (Wouldn't it be nice if Slashdot support post annotation or editing?)
At any rate, Windows might still be a superior server platform thanks to the effectiveness of ActiveDirectory, fine-grained ACL, and so on. I am no Windows apologist (on the contrary, quite the advocate of open source solutions), but I fear Microsoft may be leaping far ahead of their competition in this space.
RedHat is stagnant. I have to admit a degree of ignorance here, but as far as I can tell, they are not really doing anything to excite interest in their market. They offer support and their own distribution (apart from Fedora Core) at outrageously high prices. (Even Windows server solutions are cheaper than RedHat.) Sure they gobbled up JBoss, but I do not think there is as much market overlap as one might suspect.
I might even go so far as to say RedHat has done a fair amount of damage to Linux adoption: they create high costs and little value or innovation likely because they face no direct competition.
With Oracle entering the picture, RedHat will be compelled to move quickly—to at least do something. I am not even quite sure what that is, but one way or another, this is adds choice for the market and that is always good, whether it results in a better RedHat or no RedHat.
Not to nitpick excessively, but you could easily substitute portions of this article with terms like (and relating to) “Internet”, “personal computer”, “telephone”, “car”, and others. Asking ourselves if a technology is “real or science fiction” when it already exists (albiet in a primitive form) is silly. Of course it exists; the question itself cites examples. Perhaps the meaningful questions might be along the lines of: “what are the challenges associated with making it accurate?” or “what impact will facial recognition have on society?”
There needs to be a consistent negative response to technologies that inhibit fair usage of purchased media. Not only should hackers continue to find work-arounds that fix defects such as the inability to tranfer media between devices, consumers should regularly use them. Maybe it is optimistically naive, but I think over a long enough period, companies will eventually come to see the waste of deliberately breaking their products.
I am sure now we do not want SGI to make a come-back. People here have mentioned that they have made interesting products in the past, but now that they are unable to compete, they will become a purely litigious company. They could not and cannot keep up, so they are effectively determined to hold everyone else back. This is yet another example of a failed patent system defeating what is demonstrably productive market economics. SGI, when it was king of graphics, failed to deliver the substantial improvements in technology at better prices demanded by the market, so the market turned elsewhere. That is precisely what should happen and it does not matter who came up with those developments in the first place.
More like a shot in the mouth. Very ho-hum.
I just heard some sad news on talk radio - Sci Fi actor James Doohan, affectionately known as "Scotty", was found dead in his NC-1701 quarters this morning. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to popular culture. Truly a Federation icon.
Yes, I did.
(Emphasis added.) This is an implementation detail in the absence of an implementation.
(Again, emphasis added.) There is no product. This is a concept.
So yes, I am correct. It does not matter what else the company does, the Slashdot article still presents it as an implemented product, at first. At the very least, the post is contradictory.
They're renderings. I don't think they've decided on the exact technology yet for displaying the images in the keys. Funny how someone's art project (although really cool) gets presented on /. like it's a product.
If you would like to see legal action like this stop, why not drop some change to someone who might fight back? Perhaps if enough financial support appears, the site's maintainer might actually be willing to challenge this.
Remember: we will always lose to the corporations if we fail to put our words into action. In most of these situations, action means money.
Does reading something like this make anyone else here sick to the stomach? The basic premis here is that Hasbro assumes people are too stupid to tell the difference between a knock-off and the original. And for that reason, this person's work has to be destroyed. Furthermore, the part that really felt like a kick to me, this somehow makes the domain useless to the original owner and he must therefore hand it over to Hasbro. Meanwhile, this is all as if nobody ever thought of crossword puzzles before.
This nonsense will be the end of all progress in society as we know it. The only proper response to this travesty is for 100 similar scabble games to pop-up to replace this one. For each of those that get taken down, 100 more.