Seriously, how many of those other distros will be offered in Asian language wrapping, as I recall LinuxOne intends? Pacific HiTech, perhaps, but what else?
It's all marketing - Bill G didn't win by good code or efficient code - it was marketing.
As I understand it, they may (like Pacific HiTech) have some ability to provide tech support in native languages to certain asian communities. Or FAQs or HowTos. Any of those might be useful.
Come back and post after you've read an introductory economics text.
I was just cleaning out my closet this morning for one of those chairties, and kept three of my economics text books. Microeconomics, Macroeconomics, and Canadian Business Economics. I've got a 2 year Business Admin certificate from Capilano College, in addition to three other certifications, military training (TQ4), the usual college 4 year, Oracle Developers Certification, and a Data Resource Mgmt post-grad certificate from the University of Washington.
The market doesn't care about profitability per se. It it merely a method of balancing buyers and sellers. However, investors (those who buy and sell shares) invest their money for a return, expecting a premium for placing money in stocks, a less liquid form than bonds or cash or certificates of deposit.
Hence, given an amount of stock in Red Hat equal to an amount of stock in LinuxOne, and where Red Hat provides service to technogeeks and LinuxOne charges tons of dollars for service, thus meaning that, even though Red Hat has 1 million copies of their distro shipped each year (or downloaded) and makes 10 cents off each, while LinuxOne ships 100,000 Chinese language copies of Mandrake repackaged and then charges more for support calls but the tech support is asian-friendly, it is totally possible that LinuxOne could be more profitable.
Personally, I doubt it. It's probably a grand rip off. And if Red Hat is more profitable and regarded as less risky than LinuxOne, then the stock market over the long run should value Red Hat stock more highly than LinuxOne.
But right now, 95 percent or more of investors in Linux stocks haven't the faintest idea what they're worth and probably don't know much about Linux either. Hence, it is totally possible they'll get sucked into the latest tulip mania (or PenguinManiaTM) and buy shares in LinuxOne. And get taken to the cleaners.
This is obviously a ploy to help with fund raising in an election year. People don't want real solutions, they just want to think they're doing something about the problems in society.
Tons of legislators put up hundreds of bills designed to go nowhere in state legislatures - this allows them to make impassioned speeches in front of big buck contributors who think Net censorship is cool and don't want to actually come up with real solutions that work.
Expect more of this - it's a big election year due to the Presidential elections, so they need even more dollars to reach even more voters if they're going to get reelected.
... Market Forces will choose the better distros over the worse ones.
The market, in the long run, given perfect access at no cost in real time to all information, will choose the most profitable distro over other, not as profitable, distros.
Basically, must market mavens have imperfect info, have no idea what Linux is, and don't even know the ls command, let alone their mother's maiden name. I wouldn't count on them to choose wisely.
Actually, when that ticker says LINX and the market notification of IPO pops up, it is highly likely that a number of non-techies are going to shove a lot of dollars into it real fast.
Never underestimate the intelligence of the average day trader, nor that of your average stock broker.
This is based on the concept that the Chinese population, adopting Linux en masse, is as severely thwarted as the Eastern European and Middle Eastern virus writers of Win/DOS fame.
I see no signs of that. They're not dissaffected in regards to computers, and would probably rather write Windows 2000 viruses to get back at the US than their "own" Linux. Wouldn't it be more of a point to attack Bill Gates than to attack your own system?
When I go into the store, I ask them if it's out on the iMac (my son's computer) or Linux. I make them look it up to see when it'll be for one of those.
If it won't work with either of those - I don't buy it.
No, Lenin is on top of an apartment building in the east village, NYC.
Perhaps, but Fremont is the Center of the Universe, whereas NYC is only known for all the yearning masses heading to Seattle to escape the Grim City of Gotham.
;-)
Still, I don't think Bill G lives in NYC, so Fremont is probably the closest place for him to go and see a statue of Lenin. Unless he has one in his house, for the kids to play on.
In my day we had to write the assembler code by hand and compile it ourselves. Then we had to manufacture the floppy disks ourselves and mail them. And we had 8 inch floppies. None of this CD-ROM stuff.
And we didn't have help desks. We didn't even have 1-800 numbers. And 1-888 numbers didn't exist. We dialed the phone manually, and it was a rotary phone. And since there was no voice mail and no call waiting, we had to hope they were in the office when we phoned. If they could afford an office. Or a phone.
And if you wanted to download the patch, you had to connect at 110 or 300 baud.
Next thing you know you'll be saying that Corporations should have to provide some public good (true until 1930) and should be liable for their actions (true until the 60s, 1965 I think).
Exactly. I hold a series of copyrights to terms that are probably used in many modern gaming systems, on file at the Library of Congress (under my old double-hyphen name). If I chose to enforce those, I could probably ruin the modern gaming industry.
UCITA can effectively allow various monopolies and quasi-monopolies to control many things under the guise of "consumer protection".
I've got legislators on the lookout for it, and checked with the Attorney General. If they try to backdoor it, it has to come through one of the committees they're on. And as a longtime friend, they owe me big time if they don't even tell me when it comes through.
But I would worry about Virginia, New Jersey, and Maryland. The corporate HQ concentration there makes it highly likely to be a State of first invokation.
Not if there is an NDA agreement in one of the cluases. Many companies now exclude the right to review or benchmark the product. Since UCITA will be enforceable under contract law, they could just as easily stick in a 'can not reveal the terms of this agreement' clause.
And which company would use that? They'd have to be a monopoly...
I've had extensive discussions with some of the Washington State Reps and Senators on this issue, including some of those on the Technology and Commerce committees (which have names I can't recall right now). I believe you are misstating the true impact of UCITA.
A wolf in sheep's clothing, actually. Under UCITA, if it passes in Virginia and Texas, they could get a judge in Texas to allow a firm to get the back door access to a firm in Virginia, provided they did business there. And, with the Net, that's not hard to prove. You just have to shop around for a judge who gets elected in a city where this issue might mean a lot of cash to his reelection campaign.
My extensive involvement in politics leads me to believe this will occur, regardless of all the "it can't happen here" statements of UCITA defenders. Just like the Roth IRA will be taxed by the time I retire. Politicians, and judges in many states, will do what works for them and come up with a fancy reason why it's ok.
I'm not saying there aren't some good concepts in UCITA, I'm saying that the approved language is severely flawed in practice and implementation. These issues do need to be addressed, but not at the cost of consumers who are supposed to read pages of inserts in legalese with their bills which refer them to a web site that changes the terms of their contract which they haven't even read. It's like buying a house - when I did it, I read the contracts, which very few people do. And I found three substantial mistakes, by doing so, that could cause trouble down the road.
Ignorance under the law means you lose and the lawyers on the other side win.
President is the president, tends to set policy, and is a corporate signing authority for legal matters. Incorporation normally has a president, a treasurer, and a secretary required to sign and affirm certain documents.
CEO is Chief Executive Officer. Tends to run the company. The big cheese.
Chairman of the board runs the meetings of the Board of Directors, which can hire and fire the President and the CEO. The chairman can either run the board (usually holding many shares then) or can be just someone who makes sure meetings occur (usually few shares or a compromise position for a company with large shareholders who disagree on certain issues).
Any of these can be given powers the others might have. This is decided by the shareholders and the Board of Directors. And their jobs can be changed at whim. The Chief Technology Architect could take control if he happened to own nearly 20% of the company (e.g. Bill Gates), for example.
It's just a name. Bill is still Bill. He just doesn't want to do the boring legal stuff anymore and at $100 billion that's his call.
johnos said Lenin has left the building Stalin has arrived
Not true. Lenin is in Seattle, in the center of the Fremont neighbourhood just two blocks from my house. It's a large iron statue, kind of hard to miss, albeit not as well-known as the Fremont Troll.
And Bill is more of a Rasputin character in his own way... Ballmer more of a Yeltsin soon to fade after the breakup, offered as a sacrificial lamb unto the Y2K gods.
Yup, technically Ballmer could axe Gates for his sloppy coding style. But remember Bill still owns almost 20% of Microsoft.
In some ways, this is an insurance policy. If they split up the company, Bill is no longer CEO and can just get shares in each company and control it through himself and his buds shares.
I think the polling indicated that most developers were willing to pay somewhere between $100 and $300 for C++ Builder, so I'm expecting the Developer's version to price for that. The Enterprise Edition should price about the same as other platforms, though; albeit with a "special upgrade" pricing and "new customer" pricing to get us to use their software.
And, as others have said, you can always use GCC if prices like this scare you off.
I think you're correct that it would be worse. Also, nothing would prevent them from just happening to choose to use the standards of the other Baby Bills, especially if they're all owned by the same people.
Be careful what you ask for, you might get it.
Now, restrictions on separate pricings other than those published to the public (e.g. volume discounts), requirements to publish all APIs to all requestors for a reasonable license, and cancellation of NDA requirements for contract specifics unrelated to technical data... these might do some good.
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously, how many of those other distros will be offered in Asian language wrapping, as I recall LinuxOne intends? Pacific HiTech, perhaps, but what else?
It's all marketing - Bill G didn't win by good code or efficient code - it was marketing.
Still think LinuxOne is IPO hype-fodder.
As I understand it, they may (like Pacific HiTech) have some ability to provide tech support in native languages to certain asian communities. Or FAQs or HowTos. Any of those might be useful.
I still think it's a scam, but who knows?
Come back and post after you've read an introductory economics text.
I was just cleaning out my closet this morning for one of those chairties, and kept three of my economics text books. Microeconomics, Macroeconomics, and Canadian Business Economics. I've got a 2 year Business Admin certificate from Capilano College, in addition to three other certifications, military training (TQ4), the usual college 4 year, Oracle Developers Certification, and a Data Resource Mgmt post-grad certificate from the University of Washington.
The market doesn't care about profitability per se. It it merely a method of balancing buyers and sellers. However, investors (those who buy and sell shares) invest their money for a return, expecting a premium for placing money in stocks, a less liquid form than bonds or cash or certificates of deposit.
Hence, given an amount of stock in Red Hat equal to an amount of stock in LinuxOne, and where Red Hat provides service to technogeeks and LinuxOne charges tons of dollars for service, thus meaning that, even though Red Hat has 1 million copies of their distro shipped each year (or downloaded) and makes 10 cents off each, while LinuxOne ships 100,000 Chinese language copies of Mandrake repackaged and then charges more for support calls but the tech support is asian-friendly, it is totally possible that LinuxOne could be more profitable.
Personally, I doubt it. It's probably a grand rip off. And if Red Hat is more profitable and regarded as less risky than LinuxOne, then the stock market over the long run should value Red Hat stock more highly than LinuxOne.
But right now, 95 percent or more of investors in Linux stocks haven't the faintest idea what they're worth and probably don't know much about Linux either. Hence, it is totally possible they'll get sucked into the latest tulip mania (or PenguinMania TM) and buy shares in LinuxOne. And get taken to the cleaners.
Here endeth the lesson.
This is obviously a ploy to help with fund raising in an election year. People don't want real solutions, they just want to think they're doing something about the problems in society.
Tons of legislators put up hundreds of bills designed to go nowhere in state legislatures - this allows them to make impassioned speeches in front of big buck contributors who think Net censorship is cool and don't want to actually come up with real solutions that work.
Expect more of this - it's a big election year due to the Presidential elections, so they need even more dollars to reach even more voters if they're going to get reelected.
Seriously, how many people bought software, especially when they were just starting out, which never quite worked?
...
We just don't want to admit that we, too, once were clueless newbies. Me, I'm always a newbie at heart
... Market Forces will choose the better distros over the worse ones.
The market, in the long run, given perfect access at no cost in real time to all information, will choose the most profitable distro over other, not as profitable, distros.
Basically, must market mavens have imperfect info, have no idea what Linux is, and don't even know the ls command, let alone their mother's maiden name. I wouldn't count on them to choose wisely.
Actually, when that ticker says LINX and the market notification of IPO pops up, it is highly likely that a number of non-techies are going to shove a lot of dollars into it real fast.
...
Never underestimate the intelligence of the average day trader, nor that of your average stock broker.
Hey, it says Linux, right? So it must be good
This is based on the concept that the Chinese population, adopting Linux en masse, is as severely thwarted as the Eastern European and Middle Eastern virus writers of Win/DOS fame.
I see no signs of that. They're not dissaffected in regards to computers, and would probably rather write Windows 2000 viruses to get back at the US than their "own" Linux. Wouldn't it be more of a point to attack Bill Gates than to attack your own system?
When I go into the store, I ask them if it's out on the iMac (my son's computer) or Linux. I make them look it up to see when it'll be for one of those.
If it won't work with either of those - I don't buy it.
Windows is so 20th Century.
Yup, cloudy here too. You'd think Bill G or Paul A could pay to get some clear skies or something.
...
And I've got a rooftop waiting to be used, with a fairly clear view of the night sky
No, Lenin is on top of an apartment building in the east village, NYC.
Perhaps, but Fremont is the Center of the Universe, whereas NYC is only known for all the yearning masses heading to Seattle to escape the Grim City of Gotham.
;-)
Still, I don't think Bill G lives in NYC, so Fremont is probably the closest place for him to go and see a statue of Lenin. Unless he has one in his house, for the kids to play on.
In my day we had to write the assembler code by hand and compile it ourselves. Then we had to manufacture the floppy disks ourselves and mail them. And we had 8 inch floppies. None of this CD-ROM stuff.
...
And we didn't have help desks. We didn't even have 1-800 numbers. And 1-888 numbers didn't exist. We dialed the phone manually, and it was a rotary phone. And since there was no voice mail and no call waiting, we had to hope they were in the office when we phoned. If they could afford an office. Or a phone.
And if you wanted to download the patch, you had to connect at 110 or 300 baud.
And we liked it
Next thing you know you'll be saying that Corporations should have to provide some public good (true until 1930) and should be liable for their actions (true until the 60s, 1965 I think).
;-)
Exactly. I hold a series of copyrights to terms that are probably used in many modern gaming systems, on file at the Library of Congress (under my old double-hyphen name). If I chose to enforce those, I could probably ruin the modern gaming industry.
UCITA can effectively allow various monopolies and quasi-monopolies to control many things under the guise of "consumer protection".
Actually, that won't save you. Did you forget about Free Trade and NAFTA? You already bought in to our legal system if you buy US software.
Sigh.
Yeah, but
No Jail Time = Cost Of Doing Business
Until you make the Board of Directors and Execs do jail terms, it's meaningless. A cost of doing business.
I've got legislators on the lookout for it, and checked with the Attorney General. If they try to backdoor it, it has to come through one of the committees they're on. And as a longtime friend, they owe me big time if they don't even tell me when it comes through.
But I would worry about Virginia, New Jersey, and Maryland. The corporate HQ concentration there makes it highly likely to be a State of first invokation.
Not if there is an NDA agreement in one of the cluases. Many companies now exclude the right to review or benchmark the product. Since UCITA will be enforceable under contract law, they could just as easily stick in a 'can not reveal the terms of this agreement' clause.
...
And which company would use that? They'd have to be a monopoly
I've had extensive discussions with some of the Washington State Reps and Senators on this issue, including some of those on the Technology and Commerce committees (which have names I can't recall right now). I believe you are misstating the true impact of UCITA.
A wolf in sheep's clothing, actually. Under UCITA, if it passes in Virginia and Texas, they could get a judge in Texas to allow a firm to get the back door access to a firm in Virginia, provided they did business there. And, with the Net, that's not hard to prove. You just have to shop around for a judge who gets elected in a city where this issue might mean a lot of cash to his reelection campaign.
My extensive involvement in politics leads me to believe this will occur, regardless of all the "it can't happen here" statements of UCITA defenders. Just like the Roth IRA will be taxed by the time I retire. Politicians, and judges in many states, will do what works for them and come up with a fancy reason why it's ok.
I'm not saying there aren't some good concepts in UCITA, I'm saying that the approved language is severely flawed in practice and implementation. These issues do need to be addressed, but not at the cost of consumers who are supposed to read pages of inserts in legalese with their bills which refer them to a web site that changes the terms of their contract which they haven't even read. It's like buying a house - when I did it, I read the contracts, which very few people do. And I found three substantial mistakes, by doing so, that could cause trouble down the road.
Ignorance under the law means you lose and the lawyers on the other side win.
President is the president, tends to set policy, and is a corporate signing authority for legal matters. Incorporation normally has a president, a treasurer, and a secretary required to sign and affirm certain documents.
CEO is Chief Executive Officer. Tends to run the company. The big cheese.
Chairman of the board runs the meetings of the Board of Directors, which can hire and fire the President and the CEO. The chairman can either run the board (usually holding many shares then) or can be just someone who makes sure meetings occur (usually few shares or a compromise position for a company with large shareholders who disagree on certain issues).
Any of these can be given powers the others might have. This is decided by the shareholders and the Board of Directors. And their jobs can be changed at whim. The Chief Technology Architect could take control if he happened to own nearly 20% of the company (e.g. Bill Gates), for example.
It's just a name. Bill is still Bill. He just doesn't want to do the boring legal stuff anymore and at $100 billion that's his call.
johnos said Lenin has left the building Stalin has arrived
... Ballmer more of a Yeltsin soon to fade after the breakup, offered as a sacrificial lamb unto the Y2K gods.
Not true. Lenin is in Seattle, in the center of the Fremont neighbourhood just two blocks from my house. It's a large iron statue, kind of hard to miss, albeit not as well-known as the Fremont Troll.
And Bill is more of a Rasputin character in his own way
Yup, technically Ballmer could axe Gates for his sloppy coding style. But remember Bill still owns almost 20% of Microsoft.
In some ways, this is an insurance policy. If they split up the company, Bill is no longer CEO and can just get shares in each company and control it through himself and his buds shares.
I think the polling indicated that most developers were willing to pay somewhere between $100 and $300 for C++ Builder, so I'm expecting the Developer's version to price for that. The Enterprise Edition should price about the same as other platforms, though; albeit with a "special upgrade" pricing and "new customer" pricing to get us to use their software.
And, as others have said, you can always use GCC if prices like this scare you off.
OK, guess we can all get ready to use C++ Builder for Linux. Not that I'm complaining, but that's what this will mean.
Yeah, I could hand-code it or use the other tool sets, but let's get real here.
I think you're correct that it would be worse. Also, nothing would prevent them from just happening to choose to use the standards of the other Baby Bills, especially if they're all owned by the same people.
... these might do some good.
Be careful what you ask for, you might get it.
Now, restrictions on separate pricings other than those published to the public (e.g. volume discounts), requirements to publish all APIs to all requestors for a reasonable license, and cancellation of NDA requirements for contract specifics unrelated to technical data