how about drivers for an DVD inlay board (like the creative ct7160 -- i've seen mention of people working on them, but that's about it)? are there any other inlay boards that work with linux?
about the only thing that's going to happen here is a shareholder lawsuit after netpliance goes out of business. it's pretty clear that they put some positive spin on the hack before the IPO so they could get their money. there's no way that their business plan is going to work. the things were sitting on the shelves before the hack & if their "hardware mods" are effective, they're going to be sitting there again. there is nothing compelling about their business plan. there is nothing compelling about sitting in front of a 10" DSTN screen when i can sit in front of my 35" web tv (web & TV integration is a necessity for anything like these internet appliances to work) their best hope is to get bought up by AOL or somebody who has a chance of making something like this work.
whistle interjets have used freebsd for as long as i can remember. it just so happens that they have since been bought by IBM. then the question becomes: why mess with something that works?
just when i thought i'd finally get one accepted
on
Free Be
·
· Score: 1
somebody beats me to it. something that wasn't mentioned was the the OS was going to be runnable from with windows. i don't know how its going to work, but it didn't sound like it needed a dedicated BeFS partition. when i first read it, i thought it would run in a vmware-like environment. anybody know for sure?
i read most of the legalese the other day, but didn't follow the 1000 or so messages here, so i'm wondering if someone can clear this up for me: why aren't the DVD people suing xing? that's where the breakdown in the trade secrets happened (decss supposedly happened because xing was negligent with their key & from my reading of the legalities of trade secrets, they're the ones negligent in letting it slip out -- they're the ones who signed the agreement, etc.) xing should be suing the decss authors because they "broke" the (bogus, imho) "no-reverse engineering" clause in their license. and that doesn't even start to get into the linking legalities issue...
if they argue that even one patent was invalid, then that would implicitly invalidate some (or most) of their patents (and most of their revenue). my what a tangled web we weave...
i should be putting it in my walls, on my windows, heck i should be be wearing it. what, me paranoid?
seriously, if a cookie cost somebody their credit card number, the responsibility is on the web site, not on cookies. it was just a bit to promote there digitalme stuff, but in a high-tech world and as a head of a high-tech company, you shouldn't be making yourself look like an idiot. it might have sounded cool to some marketers, but it didn't come out that way.
but that if there is no competition, eventually it will suck. (Note: this is not intended to be flamebait)
this is primarily only true for closed source products where it's not profitable to continue to dump resources into it that product anymore. people are always going to tinker with software like this, if nothing else to make their lives easier. the other danger is that everyone starts "thinking inside the box" and no new features are added, which likewise isn't true because we all have the source and can tinker if we think of some cool new feature.
i can understand your concern, though. the problem is this: who gets forced to not use linux?
it may have a place somewhere, but where i'm not sure. they use it in everything from set-top boxes to smart cards. i can see set-top boxes. i can even see it on handheld pc's. but smart cards? what are these people smoking? it's not like its hard to write an embedded OS to do just the things that a smart card needs. the success of palm has proven (although on the PDA front) that what works best in confined spaces is something designed specifically for that device. there's very little that's more confining than a smart card.
people seem to be polarized when it comes to NT & linux stability, but this is a pretty accurate description of real life. a lot of people install NT & a few apps and things work fine. a lot of times you'll do the same and it'll be unstable. some tweaking can usually make it stable & it'll be reasonably stable, assuming you haven't pulled out all of your hair (or an automatic weapon). and then, of course, there are those occasions when there's no chance whatsoever. i have no doubt the first group exists, but do you want to take your chances that you'll fall in that group.
my take on NT is this: i don't mind unstability if i can fix it, but i run in to too many road blocks and frustrations trying to solve problems that it's really frustrating. i've run into a few similar situations where tweaking & a little voodoo creates a pretty stable NT machine, but spending a week on it can be pretty frustrating. i'll admit that i don't have any official training being an NT admin, but i'm having a hard time believing that it would help. i really believe that 60% of NT's stability problems are related to DLL conflicts, (which is probably why installation order solves problems like this) and finding those problems can't be taught (especially at $1K+ for a class)
worse yet, i'm a bit of a source-code communist, but here's my take on it. if your program just uses the database and isn't integrally tied to it, then it should be ok. technically speaking, you can make an argument that the client library is a seperate entity from the database server in general, so even though you have to give out the source to the database server (which already is free! free! free!, not GPL "free"), you shouldn't have to give the source to your main application. worst case, fork the source and use the new library to access the old database. just claim the new library is "compatible" with the old database, not an "integral part" of it because it came from a different source fork before it was tainted by the GPL. sounds like underhanded legal garbage bundled with absurd technicalities, but, hey, what legal garbage isn't? while i'm at it, always remember to ignore clueless AC's & check the mailing lists -- there was a thread on that a while back, but i didn't get involved, so i don't know what was said. heck, it could have been you that asked the question there & didn't get any answers, so you asked here.
i'm not hugely knowledgable about wireless stuff, but from what i've read GSM makes it seem a lot more elegant than the rest. maybe they should be calling it GEFTUSM (global except for the US system for mobile communications). the acronym is propbably just a bit too long.
same here. and while i agree that life would be tougher without a second mainstream browser on the windows platform (expecially given MS's past history), there is just too much other stuff working against MS in this case.
MS's browser share is almost 100% tied to its desktop OS monopoly (there may be some die-hard Mac OS users, but for the most part would probably just as well use something else. the unix version is some sort of hideous monstrosity that should be put to sleep asap.) they don't have a browser for win CE (last i heard , they were licensing a spyglass browser for it). and webTV doesn't use IE -- MS is trying to get the boxes to run CE instead of whatever they're running now and when they accomplish that, they won't even be able to run IE on it.
so the question is: do you think MS/IE is going to dominate the total number of browsers out there? that's the key to see who controls the web standards. and what's the prospect for growth in information appliances/non-windows desktops, which is where MS is struggling mightily with IE market share?
> "Our research shows that as many as 50 percent > of AOL members are extremely dissatisfied and > would switch to another provider with better and > more reliable service," he said.
> I think it's more along the lines of "50% of AOL > realized that AOL sucks, they are no longer > newbies, and can do without the constant > handholding and advertising."
or it could be just an old survey. my wife isn't a newbie, has free standard internet access through my job, and hated AOL 6 months ago. now she uses it all the time -- she claims since upgrading to AOL 4, it's a lot faster than it used to be, which was her main complaint.
>They would be much better off to port things >like their DNS implimentation to the UNIX side >and embrace-and-extend the UNIX platforms.
they're half way there. the new "dynamic DNS" in w2k isn't compatible with anything else out there. fortunately, MS is too bull-headed to put more than a token effort into anything other than win32 so it won't happen.
otoh, if interix gets integrated into w2k (hey, i can actually see a case for saying unix compatibility is an integral part of an OS), there'd be a great least common denominator across mac os x, nt, and all the unices. clearly not in the best interest of one of the building blocks of the MS monopoly: control the API
otth, does anybody remember unix services for NT (or whatever they were calling it)? wasn't that supposed to help the transition from unix to NT? and how big of a joke was that? you've got to believe this move is to help along that transition, and they're trying real hard. but the fact remains: no matter how much you try to make it look like unix, nt is still nt and you're not fooling anybody (except maybe some PHBs)
red hat lite is a great idea but the funny thing is that if you market something as "lite", you expect less features for less price. great for most products unless your product is support (a la redhat & every other linux distribution) red hat should be charging more for a red hat lite because the newbies are the ones requiring the most tech support.
i think the goal may be to feed off that beanie baby frenzy that is going to be ending in the next few months. people are going to have to collect all 50, some quarters are going to be retired soon and they'll become more valuable, and so on and so forth. get in on the collecting quarters thing early. some day all those quarters will be worth something.
there's a commercial for some car company where the people do just this (hop in their car to drive down the driveway to get their mail). maybe some people just take things a little more seriously than others.
either way, you may want to have your blood pressure checked. if you get worked up over this, you may have bigger problems to deal with.
>As an IS guy who does a lot of user support, >let me just say that the real cost of an office >suite is porting apps, templates, and getting >the users up to speed.
this is true for big business, but sun(star) has a decent shot at the SOHO market and end users with cheap PC. one of the reasons windows is so popular is because people use it at home, therefore free training for the company/no learning curve.
chances are good, though, that this is just another of those meaningless purchases. it would be great if they could figure out what they wanted to do and actually do it. just a simple brainstorming session will give you half a dozen ways to help sun/hurt MS (equally as important to sun). it's going to end up mired in the standard big business/old school/stockholder pleasing mentality and it'll be dumped, i'm afraid.
you know there is a guy in japan who claims to have (if i remember correctly) a 3000 year business plan. still an order of magnitude lower, but not unprecedented...
1) people that create messenger servers -- either sold or OSS on other platforms (i'm guessing MS will only offer theirs on NT)
2) people that create messenger client alternatives -- either for sale or OSS
3) MS, who can draw you in to using the protocol, then change it on a whim & not release the new protocol specs, and you're stuck with a basically non-functional client or server. (then again, think of samba. that's a big reason why linux has the market share it does have. MS messed with SMB just like AOL messed with their protocol, but samba just continues going, better than ever.)
if you need something like this to work yourself up over, i feel sorry for you.
this is just another in a long line of publicity stunts that MS is trying to pull off. remember "scalability days" (i think that's what they called it)? terraserver? now this cracking test? it's astounding that people have such short memories, but that's the way things works. each of these three displays fizzled at first, then they got swept under the carpet. the problem is that if it's a win for MS, it's a _big_ win because they can market the hell out of it. if not, somehow they make everybody forget about it. (maybe they have one of those memory-eraser things from "Men In Black" - heck, all those billions of R&D have to go somewhere. i don't thing they've ever actually pulled a product out of R&D, it's all copying/embrace & extend).
anyway, some things:
1) the contention that it's beta software -- if it's beta, then don't expose it to a huge media frenzy. if you jump into the fire without an asbestos suit, you're going to get burned.
2) this is such an invalid test, i wouldn't be surprised if was being administered by mindcraft. i mean, come on, who thinks they're actually going to see any valid test results from this. i feel sorry for anybody who actually takes this test to be a test and not a stunt.
3) the volume of attempts on NT vs the LinuxPPC box have got to be skewed so horrendously that this comparison shouldn't even be brought up by any respectable reporter without finding out what that difference is and reporting it.
Slashdot Mirror
how about drivers for an DVD inlay board (like the creative ct7160 -- i've seen mention of people working on them, but that's about it)? are there any other inlay boards that work with linux?
about the only thing that's going to happen here is a shareholder lawsuit after netpliance goes out of business. it's pretty clear that they put some positive spin on the hack before the IPO so they could get their money. there's no way that their business plan is going to work. the things were sitting on the shelves before the hack & if their "hardware mods" are effective, they're going to be sitting there again. there is nothing compelling about their business plan. there is nothing compelling about sitting in front of a 10" DSTN screen when i can sit in front of my 35" web tv (web & TV integration is a necessity for anything like these internet appliances to work) their best hope is to get bought up by AOL or somebody who has a chance of making something like this work.
whistle interjets have used freebsd for as long as i can remember. it just so happens that they have since been bought by IBM. then the question becomes: why mess with something that works?
somebody beats me to it. something that wasn't mentioned was the the OS was going to be runnable from with windows. i don't know how its going to work, but it didn't sound like it needed a dedicated BeFS partition. when i first read it, i thought it would run in a vmware-like environment. anybody know for sure?
i read most of the legalese the other day, but didn't follow the 1000 or so messages here, so i'm wondering if someone can clear this up for me: why aren't the DVD people suing xing? that's where the breakdown in the trade secrets happened (decss supposedly happened because xing was negligent with their key & from my reading of the legalities of trade secrets, they're the ones negligent in letting it slip out -- they're the ones who signed the agreement, etc.) xing should be suing the decss authors because they "broke" the (bogus, imho) "no-reverse engineering" clause in their license. and that doesn't even start to get into the linking legalities issue...
if they argue that even one patent was invalid, then that would implicitly invalidate some (or most) of their patents (and most of their revenue). my what a tangled web we weave...
(or as they say in these parts al-u-min-ee-um)
i should be putting it in my walls, on my windows, heck i should be be wearing it. what, me paranoid?
seriously, if a cookie cost somebody their credit card number, the responsibility is on the web site, not on cookies. it was just a bit to promote there digitalme stuff, but in a high-tech world and as a head of a high-tech company, you shouldn't be making yourself look like an idiot. it might have sounded cool to some marketers, but it didn't come out that way.
this is primarily only true for closed source products where it's not profitable to continue to dump resources into it that product anymore. people are always going to tinker with software like this, if nothing else to make their lives easier. the other danger is that everyone starts "thinking inside the box" and no new features are added, which likewise isn't true because we all have the source and can tinker if we think of some cool new feature.
i can understand your concern, though. the problem is this: who gets forced to not use linux?
it may have a place somewhere, but where i'm not sure. they use it in everything from set-top boxes to smart cards. i can see set-top boxes. i can even see it on handheld pc's. but smart cards? what are these people smoking? it's not like its hard to write an embedded OS to do just the things that a smart card needs. the success of palm has proven (although on the PDA front) that what works best in confined spaces is something designed specifically for that device. there's very little that's more confining than a smart card.
my take on NT is this: i don't mind unstability if i can fix it, but i run in to too many road blocks and frustrations trying to solve problems that it's really frustrating. i've run into a few similar situations where tweaking & a little voodoo creates a pretty stable NT machine, but spending a week on it can be pretty frustrating. i'll admit that i don't have any official training being an NT admin, but i'm having a hard time believing that it would help. i really believe that 60% of NT's stability problems are related to DLL conflicts, (which is probably why installation order solves problems like this) and finding those problems can't be taught (especially at $1K+ for a class)
worse yet, i'm a bit of a source-code communist, but here's my take on it. if your program just uses the database and isn't integrally tied to it, then it should be ok. technically speaking, you can make an argument that the client library is a seperate entity from the database server in general, so even though you have to give out the source to the database server (which already is free! free! free!, not GPL "free"), you shouldn't have to give the source to your main application. worst case, fork the source and use the new library to access the old database. just claim the new library is "compatible" with the old database, not an "integral part" of it because it came from a different source fork before it was tainted by the GPL. sounds like underhanded legal garbage bundled with absurd technicalities, but, hey, what legal garbage isn't? while i'm at it, always remember to ignore clueless AC's & check the mailing lists -- there was a thread on that a while back, but i didn't get involved, so i don't know what was said. heck, it could have been you that asked the question there & didn't get any answers, so you asked here.
i'm not hugely knowledgable about wireless stuff, but from what i've read GSM makes it seem a lot more elegant than the rest. maybe they should be calling it GEFTUSM (global except for the US system for mobile communications). the acronym is propbably just a bit too long.
same here. and while i agree that life would be tougher without a second mainstream browser on the windows platform (expecially given MS's past history), there is just too much other stuff working against MS in this case.
MS's browser share is almost 100% tied to its desktop OS monopoly (there may be some die-hard Mac OS users, but for the most part would probably just as well use something else. the unix version is some sort of hideous monstrosity that should be put to sleep asap.) they don't have a browser for win CE (last i heard , they were licensing a spyglass browser for it). and webTV doesn't use IE -- MS is trying to get the boxes to run CE instead of whatever they're running now and when they accomplish that, they won't even be able to run IE on it.
so the question is: do you think MS/IE is going to dominate the total number of browsers out there? that's the key to see who controls the web standards. and what's the prospect for growth in information appliances/non-windows desktops, which is where MS is struggling mightily with IE market share?
they're also looking for a corporate massage therapist. i think i'm going to have to stuff idea into the local suggestion box.
> "Our research shows that as many as 50 percent
> of AOL members are extremely dissatisfied and
> would switch to another provider with better and
> more reliable service," he said.
> I think it's more along the lines of "50% of AOL
> realized that AOL sucks, they are no longer
> newbies, and can do without the constant
> handholding and advertising."
or it could be just an old survey. my wife isn't a newbie, has free standard internet access through my job, and hated AOL 6 months ago. now she uses it all the time -- she claims since upgrading to AOL 4, it's a lot faster than it used to be, which was her main complaint.
>They would be much better off to port things
>like their DNS implimentation to the UNIX side
>and embrace-and-extend the UNIX platforms.
they're half way there. the new "dynamic DNS" in w2k isn't compatible with anything else out there. fortunately, MS is too bull-headed to put more than a token effort into anything other than win32 so it won't happen.
otoh, if interix gets integrated into w2k (hey, i can actually see a case for saying unix compatibility is an integral part of an OS), there'd be a great least common denominator across mac os x, nt, and all the unices. clearly not in the best interest of one of the building blocks of the MS monopoly: control the API
otth, does anybody remember unix services for NT (or whatever they were calling it)? wasn't that supposed to help the transition from unix to NT? and how big of a joke was that? you've got to believe this move is to help along that transition, and they're trying real hard. but the fact remains: no matter how much you try to make it look like unix, nt is still nt and you're not fooling anybody (except maybe some PHBs)
but hurricanes pack quite a bit more power than even atomic bombs. you gotta love mother nature.
red hat lite is a great idea but the funny thing is that if you market something as "lite", you expect less features for less price. great for most products unless your product is support (a la redhat & every other linux distribution) red hat should be charging more for a red hat lite because the newbies are the ones requiring the most tech support.
i think the goal may be to feed off that beanie baby frenzy that is going to be ending in the next few months. people are going to have to collect all 50, some quarters are going to be retired soon and they'll become more valuable, and so on and so forth. get in on the collecting quarters thing early. some day all those quarters will be worth something.
there's a commercial for some car company where the people do just this (hop in their car to drive down the driveway to get their mail). maybe some people just take things a little more seriously than others.
either way, you may want to have your blood pressure checked. if you get worked up over this, you may have bigger problems to deal with.
>As an IS guy who does a lot of user support,
>let me just say that the real cost of an office
>suite is porting apps, templates, and getting
>the users up to speed.
this is true for big business, but sun(star) has a decent shot at the SOHO market and end users with cheap PC. one of the reasons windows is so popular is because people use it at home, therefore free training for the company/no learning curve.
chances are good, though, that this is just another of those meaningless purchases. it would be great if they could figure out what they wanted to do and actually do it. just a simple brainstorming session will give you half a dozen ways to help sun/hurt MS (equally as important to sun). it's going to end up mired in the standard big business/old school/stockholder pleasing mentality and it'll be dumped, i'm afraid.
you know there is a guy in japan who claims to have (if i remember correctly) a 3000 year business plan. still an order of magnitude lower, but not unprecedented...
1) people that create messenger servers -- either sold or OSS on other platforms (i'm guessing MS will only offer theirs on NT)
2) people that create messenger client alternatives -- either for sale or OSS
3) MS, who can draw you in to using the protocol, then change it on a whim & not release the new protocol specs, and you're stuck with a basically non-functional client or server. (then again, think of samba. that's a big reason why linux has the market share it does have. MS messed with SMB just like AOL messed with their protocol, but samba just continues going, better than ever.)
maybe redhat should think about buying SGI, then.
i guess the question i have is:
who is redhat going to acquire? it seems if you're not buying up companies with you're inflated stock, then you just don't belong in the the market.
if you need something like this to work yourself up over, i feel sorry for you.
this is just another in a long line of publicity stunts that MS is trying to pull off. remember "scalability days" (i think that's what they called it)? terraserver? now this cracking test?
it's astounding that people have such short memories, but that's the way things works. each of these three displays fizzled at first, then they got swept under the carpet. the problem is that if it's a win for MS, it's a _big_ win because they can market the hell out of it. if not, somehow they make everybody forget about it. (maybe they have one of those memory-eraser things from "Men In Black" - heck, all those billions of R&D have to go somewhere. i don't thing they've ever actually pulled a product out of R&D, it's all copying/embrace & extend).
anyway, some things:
1) the contention that it's beta software -- if it's beta, then don't expose it to a huge media frenzy. if you jump into the fire without an asbestos suit, you're going to get burned.
2) this is such an invalid test, i wouldn't be surprised if was being administered by mindcraft. i mean, come on, who thinks they're actually going to see any valid test results from this. i feel sorry for anybody who actually takes this test to be a test and not a stunt.
3) the volume of attempts on NT vs the LinuxPPC box have got to be skewed so horrendously that this comparison shouldn't even be brought up by any respectable reporter without finding out what that difference is and reporting it.