"Until the baby boomers start retiring" isn't all that long from now. The "whole slew" of software and services are in development as we speak from both MS proprietary competitors and the FOSS world.
Microsoft SHOULD specificaly work on Microsoft Windows AND Microsoft Office. Make them lot a hell better (For example, at least allowing to quickly change the pointer type when I am making a presentation, instead of showing the right-click menu); that way they will be seen better.
Those two things are the only real money makers. Everything else runs at a loss, barely breaks even, or barely makes a profit. The markets for Office and Windows are mature and can't grow very much no matter what MS does; the only real direction those two markets can go is down. No matter how much MS improves those two products, it can only maintain marketshare at best. What is worse for them is that improvements in lower priced alternatives means they have to lower prices. OOO won't go away no matter how much they lower prices. I shouldn't have to paint that picture any further.
Furthermore, vexation at the shenanigans they use their marketshare to pull is only growing. MS is addicted to infinitely growing dominant marketshares in Office and MS and will do ANYTHING to keep that. "ANYTHING" is daily creating implacable enemies. Stories of large customers migrating from MS are even starting to get boring.
My point is that if MS has their fingers in lots of moderately profitable pies then they don't set themselves up as "the enemy" who is in perpetual need of being knocked off. In the long run, decent profits in lot of markets is better than obscene profits in only two.
MS itself isn't in any real danger. They will be around for years and most likely decades to come. What IS in danger is the "nobody gets fired for buying MS" mentality. THAT isn't going to last forever. If they don't cluefully deal with it then yes they're (eventually) doomed. Wiser heads will prevail before hubris utterly destroys them.
"His promise: Longhorn, the next version of the Windows operating system, will make malicious software (malware) that gets onto computers without the users' knowledge "a thing of the past"." -Bill Gates
That just might possibly dethrone the 640kb crack. I know, I know, it isn't what he meant and is misconstrued. THIS little gem is fairly unambigous. Yes, let's remember it.
GETTING a young company to a position of dominance is thrilling and exciting. People get rich along the way which helps too. MAINTAINING that dominance is harder. There aren't as many chances to get rich and it is harder to climb the ladder quickly. In addition to the apathy which is an inevitable result of becoming a mature and established company, MS is now the King of several Hills. Now it is knocking them off that is thrilling and exciting.
If MS diversified more and didn't obsess over absolutely dominating the industry, they wouldn't be such the target. As it is, they are the "Evil Empire" and the Huns and Mongols getting hungry and sharpening their swords.
I'm a Linux user myself; but let's give props where props are due. One measure in which most any BSD is better is integration. BSD has been maintained as a coherent system since before Linux has even existed. Their userland has a bit less evolution and tad more design in it. The init scripts are arguably better due to their relative simplicity. As for features that BSD lacks, that can be a feature as well. Simplicity often =='s robustness. The individual flavors also have their own merits. There is OpenBSD's well known penchant for correctness and security. NetBSD runs on even more arches than Debian.
I'll also point out that the BSD's tend to be more predictable in their quality from release to release. There have been some real brown paper bag kernel releases and distros like RedHat and Mandrake have pulled boners on their own.
I'll bet a real BSD fanboy could probably think of a few more.
But I always ask this to the Linux guys at my compnay ( ps I also run linux ) why did linux get the market it has now and not BSD ?
Just plain marketing for one. *BSD can and probably is better by any number of measures. "Better" doesn't always equate to "sexier".
The other reason is that GPL can be more business friendly than the BSD license. The trick here is that the GPL is picky about which businesses it is friends with. For strategic reasons, a company like IBM can open something up but place the contribution under the GPL. It is perfectly free from an end user point of view but will require re-implementation on the part of a competitor who wishes to use knowledge from the code in question. This takes nothing away from scenarios where the BSD license is more "business friendly". Personally, I find the "moral" arguments around all of this induce finger drumming. If the choices were BSD or nothing or GPL or nothing then I expect we'd see much less funding of interesting projects by business.
Prior to Sober.P and Mytob.AW (new Mydoom variant) coming along, variants of HTML-Phishing were the malware kings attempting to cross a milter I admin. For the past couple of days, Mytob.AW has all but dropped off the map.
The Sober traffic here was ~= 11% of incoming mail and HTML.Phishing variants only manage 2% of incoming.
That's nice in theory but it doesn't always work. You also get this problem if the replacement mobo has a different "acpi personality" than the old one. I've made sysprep images with the generic IDE controllers and still came to tears over that issue.
Am I correct that Linux is "similar enough" to Windows?
These days it isn't terribly important that platforms resemble each other that much. Applications just need some common APIs and little elbow grease to smooth over the things APIs don't cover. Just about every major FOSS app can be run on Windows. To the extent that developers are responsible for interoperability, the FOSS world has done its part.
Another way to take this is that MS must not be very good at making clean code if they're incapable of writing to our platform yet we can write to theirs. Since they like to fling FUD so much, that might be a good bit to throw their way.
Do companies like IBM and Novell count as "aging idealist hippies"? Some of IBM's counterclaims against SCO nail them for violating IBM copyrights on their GPLed code.
Anytime a politician mentions any of those three, scrutinize verrrry carefully. Hardly anybody agrees that anyone from those groups should have any rights whatsover. This makes them perfect for bringing in practices and punishments that would otherwise be unacceptable. Call me a cynic, but anything that is OKed to do to them will slowly be expanded to others.
A "theory" has much more scientific currency than a "hypothesis". I have to laugh when I see evolution derided as "just a theory". Young earth creationism or even Intelligent Design has a long way to go to achieve being "just a theory".
Prankster gods are common in polytheistic religions. Some aspects of it turn up in the Christian Devil but "The Prankster" usually isn't an unambigously evil figure.
DS9 had a two-parter where an Ashcroftian Starfleet Admiral tried to engineer a martial-law coup-de-etat. The centerpiece of his strategy was exploiting fear of Dominion infiltration. I doubt they'd have to nads to do something along those lines in THIS climate.
How much good does that reusability do us? If a reusable rocket is as much or more costly to launch than a disposable then what is the point? If it takes longer between missions and is more dangerous for manned flight then it looks even worse. The only thing the shuttle really has going for it is that it can throw a lot of weight into orbit. We need to design something more along the lines of the old Saturn V. That would be a true "space truck".
The interior of the Earth is also heated by the decay of radioisotopes. It is hotter than what would be caused by tidal forces and residual heat left over from it's formation.
There is only the small detail of coming up with the main mirror and other optics. It only takes a minimum of 5 years to cast and grind the necessary mirror.
Remove all of the Open Source from one of these machines and you remove a big whack of the new features they are touting. Since Open Source is so eeeeevvvvvvviiilll, I suppose they'll be purging it out of their red-blooded capitalist operating system. They only need to write a cifs implementation, a desktop, a web server, a graphical mail client, a web browser, a desktop environment, a java application stack, a database, and several script interpreters. It shouldn't take their army of developers (snort!) more than a month or two to re-implement all of that.
Slashdot Mirror
"Until the baby boomers start retiring" isn't all that long from now. The "whole slew" of software and services are in development as we speak from both MS proprietary competitors and the FOSS world.
Microsoft SHOULD specificaly work on Microsoft Windows AND Microsoft Office. Make them lot a hell better (For example, at least allowing to quickly change the pointer type when I am making a presentation, instead of showing the right-click menu); that way they will be seen better.
Those two things are the only real money makers. Everything else runs at a loss, barely breaks even, or barely makes a profit. The markets for Office and Windows are mature and can't grow very much no matter what MS does; the only real direction those two markets can go is down. No matter how much MS improves those two products, it can only maintain marketshare at best. What is worse for them is that improvements in lower priced alternatives means they have to lower prices. OOO won't go away no matter how much they lower prices. I shouldn't have to paint that picture any further.
Furthermore, vexation at the shenanigans they use their marketshare to pull is only growing. MS is addicted to infinitely growing dominant marketshares in Office and MS and will do ANYTHING to keep that. "ANYTHING" is daily creating implacable enemies. Stories of large customers migrating from MS are even starting to get boring.
My point is that if MS has their fingers in lots of moderately profitable pies then they don't set themselves up as "the enemy" who is in perpetual need of being knocked off. In the long run, decent profits in lot of markets is better than obscene profits in only two.
MS itself isn't in any real danger. They will be around for years and most likely decades to come. What IS in danger is the "nobody gets fired for buying MS" mentality. THAT isn't going to last forever. If they don't cluefully deal with it then yes they're (eventually) doomed. Wiser heads will prevail before hubris utterly destroys them.
"His promise: Longhorn, the next version of the Windows operating system, will make malicious software (malware) that gets onto computers without the users' knowledge "a thing of the past"."
-Bill Gates
That just might possibly dethrone the 640kb crack. I know, I know, it isn't what he meant and is misconstrued. THIS little gem is fairly unambigous. Yes, let's remember it.
GETTING a young company to a position of dominance is thrilling and exciting. People get rich along the way which helps too. MAINTAINING that dominance is harder. There aren't as many chances to get rich and it is harder to climb the ladder quickly. In addition to the apathy which is an inevitable result of becoming a mature and established company, MS is now the King of several Hills. Now it is knocking them off that is thrilling and exciting.
If MS diversified more and didn't obsess over absolutely dominating the industry, they wouldn't be such the target. As it is, they are the "Evil Empire" and the Huns and Mongols getting hungry and sharpening their swords.
Four or five of you probably haven't seen this yet. The parent is referencing the parody here:
i sode3.html
http://www.sequentialpictures.com/moviestarwarsep
I'm a Linux user myself; but let's give props where props are due. One measure in which most any BSD is better is integration. BSD has been maintained as a coherent system since before Linux has even existed. Their userland has a bit less evolution and tad more design in it. The init scripts are arguably better due to their relative simplicity. As for features that BSD lacks, that can be a feature as well. Simplicity often =='s robustness. The individual flavors also have their own merits. There is OpenBSD's well known penchant for correctness and security. NetBSD runs on even more arches than Debian.
I'll also point out that the BSD's tend to be more predictable in their quality from release to release. There have been some real brown paper bag kernel releases and distros like RedHat and Mandrake have pulled boners on their own.
I'll bet a real BSD fanboy could probably think of a few more.
But I always ask this to the Linux guys at my compnay ( ps I also run linux ) why did linux get the market it has now and not BSD ?
Just plain marketing for one. *BSD can and probably is better by any number of measures. "Better" doesn't always equate to "sexier".
The other reason is that GPL can be more business friendly than the BSD license. The trick here is that the GPL is picky about which businesses it is friends with. For strategic reasons, a company like IBM can open something up but place the contribution under the GPL. It is perfectly free from an end user point of view but will require re-implementation on the part of a competitor who wishes to use knowledge from the code in question. This takes nothing away from scenarios where the BSD license is more "business friendly". Personally, I find the "moral" arguments around all of this induce finger drumming. If the choices were BSD or nothing or GPL or nothing then I expect we'd see much less funding of interesting projects by business.
Which part of "just about every major FOSS app can be run on Windows" did you miss?
I suggest you come down out of your ivory tower and take a look around the real world.
Prior to Sober.P and Mytob.AW (new Mydoom variant) coming along, variants of HTML-Phishing were the malware kings attempting to cross a milter I admin. For the past couple of days, Mytob.AW has all but dropped off the map.
The Sober traffic here was ~= 11% of incoming mail and HTML.Phishing variants only manage 2% of incoming.
That's nice in theory but it doesn't always work. You also get this problem if the replacement mobo has a different "acpi personality" than the old one. I've made sysprep images with the generic IDE controllers and still came to tears over that issue.
Can FirefFox pleasure me orally? (Although I am suprised no one has implemented an extension for this and some hardware, I think the answer is a 'NO')
Well, it's Open Source so if you want Firefox to have oral pleasuring then develop it yourself!
Am I correct that Linux is "similar enough" to Windows?
These days it isn't terribly important that platforms resemble each other that much. Applications just need some common APIs and little elbow grease to smooth over the things APIs don't cover. Just about every major FOSS app can be run on Windows. To the extent that developers are responsible for interoperability, the FOSS world has done its part.
Another way to take this is that MS must not be very good at making clean code if they're incapable of writing to our platform yet we can write to theirs. Since they like to fling FUD so much, that might be a good bit to throw their way.
Do companies like IBM and Novell count as "aging idealist hippies"? Some of IBM's counterclaims against SCO nail them for violating IBM copyrights on their GPLed code.
1. Terrorists
2. Pedophiles
3. Drug Dealers
Anytime a politician mentions any of those three, scrutinize verrrry carefully. Hardly anybody agrees that anyone from those groups should have any rights whatsover. This makes them perfect for bringing in practices and punishments that would otherwise be unacceptable. Call me a cynic, but anything that is OKed to do to them will slowly be expanded to others.
A "theory" has much more scientific currency than a "hypothesis". I have to laugh when I see evolution derided as "just a theory". Young earth creationism or even Intelligent Design has a long way to go to achieve being "just a theory".
Prankster gods are common in polytheistic religions. Some aspects of it turn up in the Christian Devil but "The Prankster" usually isn't an unambigously evil figure.
DS9 had a two-parter where an Ashcroftian Starfleet Admiral tried to engineer a martial-law coup-de-etat. The centerpiece of his strategy was exploiting fear of Dominion infiltration. I doubt they'd have to nads to do something along those lines in THIS climate.
This incident is causing quite the flap between the US and Italy. Could the government have intentionally leaked the full report this way?
How much good does that reusability do us? If a reusable rocket is as much or more costly to launch than a disposable then what is the point? If it takes longer between missions and is more dangerous for manned flight then it looks even worse. The only thing the shuttle really has going for it is that it can throw a lot of weight into orbit. We need to design something more along the lines of the old Saturn V. That would be a true "space truck".
The interior of the Earth is also heated by the decay of radioisotopes. It is hotter than what would be caused by tidal forces and residual heat left over from it's formation.
There is only the small detail of coming up with the main mirror and other optics. It only takes a minimum of 5 years to cast and grind the necessary mirror.
Legend is the supposedly in development update of OpenServer. You can check it the feature list here:
http://www.unidos.com/legend.html
Remove all of the Open Source from one of these machines and you remove a big whack of the new features they are touting. Since Open Source is so eeeeevvvvvvviiilll, I suppose they'll be purging it out of their red-blooded capitalist operating system. They only need to write a cifs implementation, a desktop, a web server, a graphical mail client, a web browser, a desktop environment, a java application stack, a database, and several script interpreters. It shouldn't take their army of developers (snort!) more than a month or two to re-implement all of that.
Since MOG, Didiot, and Pretenderle have shot their collective bolt; it sounds like SCO and MS need a new shill.
Mike (or was it Joel?): "I was just downstairs using my Amiga."