I'm sure this aircraft will create a lot of wind when it goes by. This wind can then be harnessed by windmills, which will produce electricity. The electricity can be used for electrolysis, producing hydrogen. The hydrogen can be converted into jet fuel. It's the perfect cycle!
Google would do well to start turning themselves into an all-in-one computing provider. This may portend the next step.
Nobody has figured out better than Google how to turn a zillion servers into the world's biggest distributed mainframe. Search and mail could be just the beginning. Google has built a platform upon which any variety of multiuser, Internet-wide applications can be built. Yesterday, it was search; today, it is mail; tomorrow... who knows? Maybe an office suite with built-in document management? Wasn't Microsoft supposed to have done this by now? (Hint: they can't because they're saddled with millions of lines of legacy crud.) Google can. Google has the know-how to truly put computing behind the glass again, where it belongs. And once they've delivered it to your desktop computer, they can deliver it to your phone, your set-top box, your refrigerator... it is my hope that Google has what it takes to finally relegate the PC to the junk heap where it belongs.
A bit of pedantry here: the dinosaurs were not decimated, otherwise they'd still be here. To decimate something is to destroy ten percent (hence the "deci-" prefix). In ancient times this was often the punishment handed to an army that conceded a defeat -- ten percent of the men were selected by lot and executed.
Soooooo... please don't use the word "decimate" to imply that something has been completely wiped out.
Generally, whenever Microsoft settles with anyone it's bad for the free world.
Microsoft settles with DOJ. Result: Microsoft doesn't get broken up like it deserved, and now wants to "license" standard Internet protocols to you.
Microsoft settles with AOL. Result: the final nail in Netscape's coffin, and the Mozilla developers all get fired. And of course, the dream of seeing Gecko in AOL client is dashed.
Microsoft settles with Sun. Result: anti-Linux collusion between Microsoft and Sun.
Microsoft settles with Novell. Result: We don't know yet, but I'm expecting something ugly. Maybe some bizarre legal cross-licensing to prevent non-commercial software from existing?
Note: subject line is deliberately provocative. I don't actually want a Commodore 64. I want most non-poweruser, non-gamer computers to go to the Commodore 64 form factor, though.
Basically, I want all major manufacturers to build something like the Zero Footprint PC. This is where the "desktop replacement" market should be going -- not towards this silly idea that everyone should have a laptop. Look at what Apple and others are doing: every time you upgrade your computer, you have to throw away a perfectly good LCD monitor?!? What's up with that? Seriously -- how many desktop users (excluding gamers and serious power users -- in other words, about 80-90 percent of them -- Slashdot users are not a representative sample) ever add or change PCI cards during the lifetime of their PC? Everything is USB or FireWire these days.
Dell and HP should ditch the mini-towers and build their low-end desktops with everything built right into the keyboard. It would make things a lot simpler, while creating less environmental waste, and everyone would save money on each upgrade. Furthermore, since there'd be more space to work with, they wouldn't have to use expensive laptop-grade parts.
I think the next important step for Thunderbird would be to allow it to be installed (via extensions and such) as a full PIM suite. Calendar, address book, etc. are features people look for, and if these were available, Thunderbird would start converting Outlook users at the same rate Firefox is converting IE users.
I wonder if the existence of Scribus is giving them reason to wake up and realize that eventually (maybe not today, but eventually) they're going to be facing some real competition in the DTP universe. If so, I have to applaud Adobe for being proactive about it.
IBM has been the open source hero for many but why on earth haven't they opened OS2? Are they just going to let it rot?
We hear this every couple of months, but let's look at the bigger picture for a minute. Why bother? OS/2 code might have been useful to the open source community half a decade ago, but by now we've made significant advances in every major area of operating system and user interface design -- there's simply nothing left in OS/2 that we can make any use of, because at this stage of the game we've already re-implemented it all.
IBM has, in fact, checked a bunch of stuff into the Linux kernel that the did own -- things like zero copy, etc. that may have been (among other places) in OS/2. So we actually did get the things which IBM owned and felt we could make use of. But if the whole OS/2 code base were opened tomorrow, I don't really think it would have much of an impact on anything. Maybe an SCO-style lawsuit from Microsoft, but not much in the technology realm.
If they're offering Verizon Online over this new FTTP service, then they're using their existing ATM backbone to distribute the packets, which is how they get DSL out to all the central offices today.
This means that the new FTTP service will likely be offered via ISP's who buy access to that network wholesale, and then connect their own networks to it. I currently use DSL service from Acecape, which is delivered via Verizon DSL, but it's not Verizon Online's network. It's Acecape's network, and it's VERY geek friendly. Static IP address, no blocked ports, and permission to run servers. I'm looking forward to the day when Acecape tells me that I can upgrade to multi-megabit service over fiber!
For those of you who are dreaming of running a hosting center in your homes, though, please keep in mind that there's much more involved than simply having a lot of bandwidth. Unless you're running stuff that's really not all that critical, you need multiple sources of good bandwidth, and BGP on your routers to keep that redundancy going over one set of IP addresses. You need very large UPS's, and diesel or gas generators to keep the power on when the utility fails. You need lots of air conditioning and humidity control. And of course you need tech support staff.
Re:A few really good Apps could make the differenc
on
Firefox - The Platform
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
That's a great demo. But the first thing I thought when I saw it was, "Damn, when Microsoft inevitably steals this and puts out their own version in the form of XAML, we in the non-Microsoft world are going to have a really hard time keeping our platform software relevant and viable."
We've got to get this stuff out there and widely used before Microsoft does. The very future of computing is probably at stake.
It goes into detail with pictures and everything, demonstrating how the technology takes advantage of the separate red, green, and blue subpixels to achieve additional smoothing.
I'm not sure how Samsung intends to implement "white subpixels" though.
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered MP3 community when IDC confirmed that MP3 market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all music files. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that MP3 has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. MP3 is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive audio test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict MP3's future. The hand writing is on the wall: MP3 faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for MP3 because MP3 is dying. Things are looking very bad for MP3. As many of us are already aware, MP3 continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
Open source MP3 is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time MP3 developers Frauhofer and Philips only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: MP3 is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Due to the troubles of Frauhofer and Philips, abysmal sales and so on, Philips went out of business and was taken over by Magnavox who sell another troubled audio system. Now MP3 is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that MP3 has steadily declined in market share. MP3 is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If MP3 is to survive at all it will be among audio dilettante dabblers. MP3 continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, MP3 is dead.
The truly universal "off button" is that big 100-amp (or more) main breaker. I guarantee it'll work. Hehe.
Seriously though... in order to avoid incurring the wrath of the society zombies among you who actually want to watch the megacrap that is today's television programming, I would suggest that this device should be subtly embedded in a baseball cap or something, and set to transmit every minute or so. That way you can turn televisions off just by looking at them, while your "alibi hand" is firmly grasping your "alibi beer" or something.:)
Remember when closing off your email servers from open relaying was a skill that not everyone had a grasp of? Here we go again. While I do agree that VoIP inevitably requires more advanced routing, it is my fear that this will be abused for a long time until admins become skilled in the art of preventing unwanted forwards. In the meantime, you'll have...
Skript kiddiez abusing it to go VoIP-to-landline on someone else's nickel (oh yes, the days of phreaking are coming back)
Bulk dialers. You thought telemarketers were bad? Wait until the spammers get a hold of free calls to your home!
BBS's are not dead. Dialup is dead, but the BBS lives on. BBS's have moved to the Internet, where they are still some of the most close-knit online communities you can find. What some people don't seem to realize about online communications is that it's the people that matter. Not files, not banner ads, not warez, not even most of what passes for "content" on most big commercial sites these days.
No other environment is quite as "folksy" as a BBS. Why do people post in the comments section on Slashdot? Because it's people reaching out and connecting with other people. We in the BBS community have never lost sight of that basic tenet, and that's why we log on to our favorite boards, day after day, year after year, decade after decade. To talk to real people.
This is going to bring in some real revenue for them. All they have to do is put some banner ads on the site, maybe some Google AdSense boxes... since everyone's going to be constantly visiting prosco.com to see what absurd things Darl is saying next, SCO can just sit back and let the ad revenue pour in!
It'll be more profitable than SCOsource ten minutes after the site launches!
No price is high enough for the Linux kernel. If Linux is ever translicensed to anything other than the GPL, it paves the way for Microsoft to eventually come up with their own closed-source version of it -- at no cost to them. From there, they could "embrace and extend" it and drive the GPL version of Linux into obscurity.
Think about that, and then tell me how much the Linux kernel is worth. $50,000? A few hundred million? A billion or more? Nope -- it's like a MasterCard commercial, in real life. "Having an operating system Microsoft can never own: PRICELESS."
I suppose I could get a "funny" mod by saying "There are some things money can't buy; for everything else, there's Microsoft" but I'm actually dead serious here.
The most widely held conspiracy theory about HIV and AIDS is that they actually found a cure years ago, but Big Pharma makes more money selling the AZT "drug cocktail" than they would make selling the cure. An independently discovered cure would probably make everything go shitstorm.
Oh, great. When (not if) Microsoft is brought to court for antitrust violations again, all MonkeyBoy has to do is enter a secret backdoor password and, *poof* all those documents containing damning evidence suddenly go "missing" -- or perhaps they simply disappear from the index as if they never existed.
Would you trust a known pedophile to give your kids a bath? If not, then why trust a convicted monopolist who is on the record for purgery with critical documents?
Wally World doesn't need to outsource.
on
Inside Wal-Mart IT
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
When you're Wal-Mart, you don't need to outsource, because you're already paying crap salaries. The slogan "Always low prices, always low pay" didn't come out of nowhere, you know.
Wal-Mart dictates its pricing across the board: to its suppliers, and to employees. When you can pay an American the salary of an Indian and get away with it, why hire the Indian?
There are very specific reasons people don't use it, X-windows being one of those big reasons.
I call bullshit.
Perhaps it's cool for the Slashbots of the world to keep complaining about X. You've been doing it for years. You've been complaining about it while not noticing that X has been improving by leaps and bounds lately -- particularly now that some innovative people are back at the helm of X.Org and FreeDesktop.Org. There's virtually no performance penalty for network transparency, there's all that cool alpha compositing stuff in there now, and some very sophisticated desktops have been built on top of it. X IS NOT A PROBLEM.
In fact, by building a new operating system that doesn't have the X Window System in it, all you're doing is throwing away the existing pool of applications. The "average user" doesn't care how the window system was built; he only cares whether his applications run. And run they do, every time you boot up one of the millions of desktop Linux systems already in existence.
The only reason Linux has not yet penetrated the desktop market in double-digit percentages is because of the chicken-and-egg problems surrounding application development vs. end user take-up. It's happening, but it's happening very slowly. And it's not going to happen with a BeOS knockoff, because that reduces your application pool to almost zero.
True, Linux has a few more technology hurdles to overcome, such as automatic detection and mounting of various types of removable storage, and these problems are currently being addressed by projects like D-Bus. We're just about at the point of pulling past Microsoft in the desktop ease-of-use department. The problems are all people-related now.
If the marketshare of Windows is going to fall, it's going to fall to Linux and Mac, not to some BeOS knockoff. Stop deluding yourself.
This is a smart move on Red Hat's part. It's clear to them that in order to remain competitive in the enterprise space, they have to have a "middleware stack" (as the industry has been calling it). Sun has SunOne/N1, Microsoft has ADS, and of course Novell has NDS/eDirectory which is soon to be a major Linux product. It would have quickly become a big gap in Red Hat's offering.
By acquiring this software, Red Hat immediately improves the value proposition of their platform. By open sourcing it, the software can quickly gain mindshare and installed base. Imagine what would have happened if Novell had done this in, say, 1999. There'd be NDS everywhere, and Active Directory wouldn't have nearly the penetration it does today.
"Rich client" is Microsoft-speak for "fat client." Don't let them define the rules of the game. They lost the browser war (yes, really, they did: they killed Netscape, but the goal was to prevent applications from moving from Windows to the Web, and at that they failed miserably) and now they're trying to take it back by relabeling the bloatedness of the conventional desktop as "rich."
Sorry, I'm not buying it. There is no "rich." There is only "fat" (runs locally) and "thin" (runs remotely).
Look at number 5 - David Blunkett. This man makes all other (previously thought to be totalitarian) Home Secretaries in the UK look positively liberal.
This is scary for those of us in the US too, because the UK is basically a beta test site for totalitarianism in the US. This will continue to be the case for as long as George W. Bushoco and his lapdog Tony Blair remain in power in their respective nations.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure this aircraft will create a lot of wind when it goes by. This wind can then be harnessed by windmills, which will produce electricity. The electricity can be used for electrolysis, producing hydrogen. The hydrogen can be converted into jet fuel. It's the perfect cycle!
Google would do well to start turning themselves into an all-in-one computing provider. This may portend the next step.
... it is my hope that Google has what it takes to finally relegate the PC to the junk heap where it belongs.
Nobody has figured out better than Google how to turn a zillion servers into the world's biggest distributed mainframe. Search and mail could be just the beginning. Google has built a platform upon which any variety of multiuser, Internet-wide applications can be built. Yesterday, it was search; today, it is mail; tomorrow... who knows? Maybe an office suite with built-in document management? Wasn't Microsoft supposed to have done this by now? (Hint: they can't because they're saddled with millions of lines of legacy crud.) Google can. Google has the know-how to truly put computing behind the glass again, where it belongs. And once they've delivered it to your desktop computer, they can deliver it to your phone, your set-top box, your refrigerator
A bit of pedantry here: the dinosaurs were not decimated, otherwise they'd still be here. To decimate something is to destroy ten percent (hence the "deci-" prefix). In ancient times this was often the punishment handed to an army that conceded a defeat -- ten percent of the men were selected by lot and executed.
Soooooo... please don't use the word "decimate" to imply that something has been completely wiped out.
Note: subject line is deliberately provocative. I don't actually want a Commodore 64. I want most non-poweruser, non-gamer computers to go to the Commodore 64 form factor, though.
Basically, I want all major manufacturers to build something like the Zero Footprint PC. This is where the "desktop replacement" market should be going -- not towards this silly idea that everyone should have a laptop. Look at what Apple and others are doing: every time you upgrade your computer, you have to throw away a perfectly good LCD monitor?!? What's up with that? Seriously -- how many desktop users (excluding gamers and serious power users -- in other words, about 80-90 percent of them -- Slashdot users are not a representative sample) ever add or change PCI cards during the lifetime of their PC? Everything is USB or FireWire these days.
Dell and HP should ditch the mini-towers and build their low-end desktops with everything built right into the keyboard. It would make things a lot simpler, while creating less environmental waste, and everyone would save money on each upgrade. Furthermore, since there'd be more space to work with, they wouldn't have to use expensive laptop-grade parts.
I think the next important step for Thunderbird would be to allow it to be installed (via extensions and such) as a full PIM suite. Calendar, address book, etc. are features people look for, and if these were available, Thunderbird would start converting Outlook users at the same rate Firefox is converting IE users.
Adding in the existing Calendar extension would be a good start. Adding in connectivity to an standards-based open source groupware server would create the end-to-end solution we've been looking for all these years.
I wonder if the existence of Scribus is giving them reason to wake up and realize that eventually (maybe not today, but eventually) they're going to be facing some real competition in the DTP universe. If so, I have to applaud Adobe for being proactive about it.
IBM has been the open source hero for many but why on earth haven't they opened OS2? Are they just going to let it rot?
We hear this every couple of months, but let's look at the bigger picture for a minute. Why bother? OS/2 code might have been useful to the open source community half a decade ago, but by now we've made significant advances in every major area of operating system and user interface design -- there's simply nothing left in OS/2 that we can make any use of, because at this stage of the game we've already re-implemented it all.
IBM has, in fact, checked a bunch of stuff into the Linux kernel that the did own -- things like zero copy, etc. that may have been (among other places) in OS/2. So we actually did get the things which IBM owned and felt we could make use of. But if the whole OS/2 code base were opened tomorrow, I don't really think it would have much of an impact on anything. Maybe an SCO-style lawsuit from Microsoft, but not much in the technology realm.
If they're offering Verizon Online over this new FTTP service, then they're using their existing ATM backbone to distribute the packets, which is how they get DSL out to all the central offices today.
This means that the new FTTP service will likely be offered via ISP's who buy access to that network wholesale, and then connect their own networks to it. I currently use DSL service from Acecape, which is delivered via Verizon DSL, but it's not Verizon Online's network. It's Acecape's network, and it's VERY geek friendly. Static IP address, no blocked ports, and permission to run servers. I'm looking forward to the day when Acecape tells me that I can upgrade to multi-megabit service over fiber!
For those of you who are dreaming of running a hosting center in your homes, though, please keep in mind that there's much more involved than simply having a lot of bandwidth. Unless you're running stuff that's really not all that critical, you need multiple sources of good bandwidth, and BGP on your routers to keep that redundancy going over one set of IP addresses. You need very large UPS's, and diesel or gas generators to keep the power on when the utility fails. You need lots of air conditioning and humidity control. And of course you need tech support staff.
That's a great demo. But the first thing I thought when I saw it was, "Damn, when Microsoft inevitably steals this and puts out their own version in the form of XAML, we in the non-Microsoft world are going to have a really hard time keeping our platform software relevant and viable."
We've got to get this stuff out there and widely used before Microsoft does. The very future of computing is probably at stake.
Here's a very good writeup on how subpixel rendering works:
http://grc.com/ctwhat.htm
It goes into detail with pictures and everything, demonstrating how the technology takes advantage of the separate red, green, and blue subpixels to achieve additional smoothing.
I'm not sure how Samsung intends to implement "white subpixels" though.
It is official; Netcraft confirms: MP3 is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered MP3 community when IDC confirmed that MP3 market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all music files. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that MP3 has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. MP3 is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive audio test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict MP3's future. The hand writing is on the wall: MP3 faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for MP3 because MP3 is dying. Things are looking very bad for MP3. As many of us are already aware, MP3 continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
Open source MP3 is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time MP3 developers Frauhofer and Philips only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: MP3 is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Due to the troubles of Frauhofer and Philips, abysmal sales and so on, Philips went out of business and was taken over by Magnavox who sell another troubled audio system. Now MP3 is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that MP3 has steadily declined in market share. MP3 is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If MP3 is to survive at all it will be among audio dilettante dabblers. MP3 continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, MP3 is dead.
Fact: MP3 is dying
The truly universal "off button" is that big 100-amp (or more) main breaker. I guarantee it'll work. Hehe.
... in order to avoid incurring the wrath of the society zombies among you who actually want to watch the megacrap that is today's television programming, I would suggest that this device should be subtly embedded in a baseball cap or something, and set to transmit every minute or so. That way you can turn televisions off just by looking at them, while your "alibi hand" is firmly grasping your "alibi beer" or something. :)
Seriously though
- Skript kiddiez abusing it to go VoIP-to-landline on someone else's nickel (oh yes, the days of phreaking are coming back)
- Bulk dialers. You thought telemarketers were bad? Wait until the spammers get a hold of free calls to your home!
I fear for the future...BBS's are not dead. Dialup is dead, but the BBS lives on. BBS's have moved to the Internet, where they are still some of the most close-knit online communities you can find. What some people don't seem to realize about online communications is that it's the people that matter. Not files, not banner ads, not warez, not even most of what passes for "content" on most big commercial sites these days.
No other environment is quite as "folksy" as a BBS. Why do people post in the comments section on Slashdot? Because it's people reaching out and connecting with other people. We in the BBS community have never lost sight of that basic tenet, and that's why we log on to our favorite boards, day after day, year after year, decade after decade. To talk to real people.
This is going to bring in some real revenue for them. All they have to do is put some banner ads on the site, maybe some Google AdSense boxes... since everyone's going to be constantly visiting prosco.com to see what absurd things Darl is saying next, SCO can just sit back and let the ad revenue pour in!
It'll be more profitable than SCOsource ten minutes after the site launches!
No price is high enough for the Linux kernel. If Linux is ever translicensed to anything other than the GPL, it paves the way for Microsoft to eventually come up with their own closed-source version of it -- at no cost to them. From there, they could "embrace and extend" it and drive the GPL version of Linux into obscurity.
Think about that, and then tell me how much the Linux kernel is worth. $50,000? A few hundred million? A billion or more? Nope -- it's like a MasterCard commercial, in real life. "Having an operating system Microsoft can never own: PRICELESS."
I suppose I could get a "funny" mod by saying "There are some things money can't buy; for everything else, there's Microsoft" but I'm actually dead serious here.
There's nothing evil/proprietary/whatever about MHT - it's just HTML + linked stuff like CSS and images packed into single MIME message.
Call me pessimistic, but this sounds like exactly the kind of thing Microsoft might have filed a submarine patent on.
The most widely held conspiracy theory about HIV and AIDS is that they actually found a cure years ago, but Big Pharma makes more money selling the AZT "drug cocktail" than they would make selling the cure. An independently discovered cure would probably make everything go shitstorm.
Oh, great. When (not if) Microsoft is brought to court for antitrust violations again, all MonkeyBoy has to do is enter a secret backdoor password and, *poof* all those documents containing damning evidence suddenly go "missing" -- or perhaps they simply disappear from the index as if they never existed.
Would you trust a known pedophile to give your kids a bath? If not, then why trust a convicted monopolist who is on the record for purgery with critical documents?
When you're Wal-Mart, you don't need to outsource, because you're already paying crap salaries. The slogan "Always low prices, always low pay" didn't come out of nowhere, you know.
Wal-Mart dictates its pricing across the board: to its suppliers, and to employees. When you can pay an American the salary of an Indian and get away with it, why hire the Indian?
There are very specific reasons people don't use it, X-windows being one of those big reasons.
I call bullshit.
Perhaps it's cool for the Slashbots of the world to keep complaining about X. You've been doing it for years. You've been complaining about it while not noticing that X has been improving by leaps and bounds lately -- particularly now that some innovative people are back at the helm of X.Org and FreeDesktop.Org. There's virtually no performance penalty for network transparency, there's all that cool alpha compositing stuff in there now, and some very sophisticated desktops have been built on top of it. X IS NOT A PROBLEM.
In fact, by building a new operating system that doesn't have the X Window System in it, all you're doing is throwing away the existing pool of applications. The "average user" doesn't care how the window system was built; he only cares whether his applications run. And run they do, every time you boot up one of the millions of desktop Linux systems already in existence.
The only reason Linux has not yet penetrated the desktop market in double-digit percentages is because of the chicken-and-egg problems surrounding application development vs. end user take-up. It's happening, but it's happening very slowly. And it's not going to happen with a BeOS knockoff, because that reduces your application pool to almost zero.
True, Linux has a few more technology hurdles to overcome, such as automatic detection and mounting of various types of removable storage, and these problems are currently being addressed by projects like D-Bus. We're just about at the point of pulling past Microsoft in the desktop ease-of-use department. The problems are all people-related now.
If the marketshare of Windows is going to fall, it's going to fall to Linux and Mac, not to some BeOS knockoff. Stop deluding yourself.
This is a smart move on Red Hat's part. It's clear to them that in order to remain competitive in the enterprise space, they have to have a "middleware stack" (as the industry has been calling it). Sun has SunOne/N1, Microsoft has ADS, and of course Novell has NDS/eDirectory which is soon to be a major Linux product. It would have quickly become a big gap in Red Hat's offering.
By acquiring this software, Red Hat immediately improves the value proposition of their platform. By open sourcing it, the software can quickly gain mindshare and installed base. Imagine what would have happened if Novell had done this in, say, 1999. There'd be NDS everywhere, and Active Directory wouldn't have nearly the penetration it does today.
"Rich client" is Microsoft-speak for "fat client." Don't let them define the rules of the game. They lost the browser war (yes, really, they did: they killed Netscape, but the goal was to prevent applications from moving from Windows to the Web, and at that they failed miserably) and now they're trying to take it back by relabeling the bloatedness of the conventional desktop as "rich."
Sorry, I'm not buying it. There is no "rich." There is only "fat" (runs locally) and "thin" (runs remotely).
Look at number 5 - David Blunkett. This man makes all other (previously thought to be totalitarian) Home Secretaries in the UK look positively liberal.
This is scary for those of us in the US too, because the UK is basically a beta test site for totalitarianism in the US. This will continue to be the case for as long as George W. Bushoco and his lapdog Tony Blair remain in power in their respective nations.