It should be painfully obvious by now that Microsoft's current MO (aside from funding the litigious bastards at SCO, and their current astroturf campaign about patents) is to lead everyone in the wrong direction about what "free" means (i.e. gratis instead of libre) and then tear down any claims made by that assumption.
Don't fall into Microsoft's trap. When talking about open source with colleagues, customers, etc. make sure they know about the true benefits. Lower TCO is part of the picture (and it does have a lower TCO when anyone not reciving Bill Buck$ is doing the measurement), but there's also the ability to interchange components at will, and the ability to interchange vendors at will, which gives everyone more leverage with their vendors. With open source, everyone wins except for software companies who have built their businesses around lock-in.
If nothing else, this whole thing should serve as a stellar example of why the phrase "open source" is an order of magnitude more versatile than the ambiguous "free software." There's no confusion as to what it really means.
This dangerous drive (and the resulting accident) happened in Canada. Clearly this will be the catalyzing event that finally will move our lawmakers to declare Canada illegal. This has been a long time in coming. (As Kyle's Mom once said... "It's not even a real country!")
As much as the 'softies love to downplay the significance of the Linux desktop, and dismiss it publicly as insignificant, irrelevant, and unfeasible... inside the walls of Redmond, they absolutely take it seriously. They know it is a serious long-term threat to their core sources of revenue, and being the financially wealthy but morally bankrupt bunch of criminals that they are, will stop at nothing to kill it.
And here's why. In 1998, anyone running a Linux desktop was a true geek. But every year brings changes, improvements, leaps in usability and application availability. Ask a marketing weasel what this means and they'll tell you that the value proposition of desktop Linux is slowly but continuously improving. Add in the economics and they'll tell you that eventually that value proposition will become too high to ignore.
Remember: there was a time when the PC itself was considered unfeasible. There was just too much momentum behind IBM's mainframes to ever unseat the venerable 3270 terminal from the business desktops of the world. How many of you are viewing Slashdot from a 3270 right now?
I think consumers will be downright insulted by this. Especially if they're not made well aware ahead of time that this is crippleware.
Case in point: Windows 2000/2003 Server "Web Edition." It's a cut-rate server they've made available to hosting companies to compete with Linux. Now and then I've had to help customers with this particular crippleware and hit a brick wall because a feature was disabled. For example, you can't make it a domain controller.
Hopefully this will insult the Asian people and they will redouble their adoption of Linux.
There's enough backstabbing and blame-shifting in modern business that it makes sense to keep emails around anyway. I frequently delete the ones that say "ok, thanks" or something equally as insignificant, but I also keep a "CYA" folder for things I may need to throw back in a customer's face later on when they claim they asked for something different, and I also never empty my "Sent" folder so when the boss comes storming in with a "Why didn't you..." rant, I can pull up the relevant email and say "See, I did."
This should be pretty obvious to anyone who's had a job with email for more than a couple of months. I used to be a good server citizen, keeping my mail store usage nice and tidy, but not anymore.
It's kind of funny to watch. Intel is choosing their words very carefully. They're saying things like, the new chip "will run programs currently being developed for AMD's 64-bit processors with very little modification." They absolutely refuse to call the new chip "AMD compatible" even though that's exactly what it is. Intel is having a lot of trouble facing the facts: they poured zillions of dollars and years of R&D into an architecture that nobody wants (Itanium), meanwhile AMD got it right (Opteron) and now they're playing catch-up.
You'd think that Intel, moreso than anyone else, would know that you just can't kill x86.
Every 'softie I've heard from who has seen the Windows code base has said the same thing: it is a labyrinthine collection of objects and subsystems that nobody really understands at a high level. It's actually a miracle that the whole thing builds in the first place. So when they change a few things for a service pack, a dozen other things break.
Microsoft deserves these problems. Their software is too tightly integrated. The benefit of having highly modular software is that problems tend to not spread beyond a single module or subsystem.
This is a good first step. As a second step, I'd like to see IBM add "...and we intend to use our patent portfolio to whack anyone who tries to use their patents against Linux."
Long term, I'd like to see corporate open source participants enter a "patent pool." You want to use OSS? You have to waive your patent rights. Perhaps a new version of the GPL could do to patents what it has already done to copyrights.
And of course, the true solution is that software patents should be abolished entirely. But as long as the Gates/Bush Corporate Empire rules the not-so-free world, that won't happen.
Joe user types are not going down to Best Buy and buy a notebook with an unfamilar OS on it. They're going to say, "I want a windows laptop!" and the trained monkeys will dutifully point them in the right direction.
Hmm, I think you've got it wrong. It actually goes something like this:
Joe user walks into Best Buy and asks for a Windows laptop.
Trained monkey shows Joe the laptop and offers him an extended warranty.
Joe says that he likes the computer and will buy it, but doesn't want the extended warranty.
Trained monkey offers the extended warranty again.
Joe refuses the extended warranty again.
Trained monkey offers the extended warranty again.
Joe refuses the extended warranty again.
Trained monkey offers the extended warranty again.
Repeat the previous two steps ad nauseum
Joe walks out of the store frustrated and orders his computer online.
It's still a rollup and/or a partial solution. OGo doesn't even have an email system in it. OpenXchange rolls in a bunch of existing packages and puts a custom Web front end on it, just like Kolab and Bynari do.
Those interested in a true ground-up implementation of an open source groupware server might want to check out the Citadel project. It's got all the usual email stuff (IMAP, POP, ESMTP), a web front-end written specifically for it, shared calendaring/scheduling, instant messaging, and a database-driven message store (which unlike Exchange, can be backed up hot).
Heh. Intel has been very careful about choosing its words. They're doing press releases that say things like "Xeon 64 will run software currently being developed for the AMD Opteron with very little modification." They categorically refuse to call their new chips "AMD64 compatible" even though that's exactly what they are. They licensed the AMD64 instruction set and renamed it.
No Linux distribution has bothered to achieve Unix branding because it's simply not important anymore. People who purchase Unix systems know what Linux is and they know it's the best and fastest growing Unix-like system out there. More importantly, they know that the applications they use have been tested on Linux, probably as a top-tier platform, often as the recommended platform (see Oracle). That being the case, why would a Unix certification from The Open Group make any difference?
Meanwhile, commercial Unix vendors are going out of their way to achieve Linux compatibility, at either the source or binary level. Linux is quickly becoming the standard to which other Unices are compared. This means two things:
The Open Group and its branding are irrelevant
Richard Stallman is effectively wrong: GNU is Unix. Except in the real world we don't call it GNU, we call it Linux.
The big downside of stored procs, from a system administration point of view, is that they make it difficult to migrate to a different brand of database. Let's say your organization just bought a brand spanking new Sun Fire 9990000 and it's got Oracle 20i running on its 512 processors. You've been granted permission to move your application onto it!
Scenario A:
You didn't use stored procs. You migrate the data, change the DSN's on your app tier, and you're done.
Scenario B:
Not only are you a moron for choosing MS SQL Server, you're a double dumbass moron because you wrote lots of stored procs and triggers. Now you can't just move the data because every RDBMS uses a different language for stored procs. If you're lucky, there might be a conversion tool. If you're really lucky, it might even convert 50% or more of your code without errors. But you're in for a lot of work.
Translation: "We're going to leverage our usual 'bundle it with the OS' approach, because we just can't stand the fact that someone other than us is making money with technology. And if users get annoyed because their two-year-old computer slows down from all the constant indexing of local content, too bad. Keeping our monopoly is more important than delivering the end user experience you want."
As always... "We don't care. We don't have to. We're Microsoft."
Let 'em stay on paper. A book printed on dead trees can be re-sold, it can be put on a shelf and read again later, it can be traded in a book club... the possibilities are endless.
Move books to digital and you'll have the "Intellectual Property" police hounding everyone. They'll want you to pay to read a book once, and you'll forfeit all other rights. Who wants DRM infecting literature?
The usual crowd of nincompoop Slashbots are going to crow "They should just leave it out! Everyone should use PNG anyway!!"
Let me answer that in advance by reminding everyone that GIF is a useful format. Everything can read it and display it. It's been around for two decades and is now a completely open and unencumbered standard.
And let's not forget that when you need to display an image that is non-lossy, and supports transparency, and displays properly in Internet Explorer (shame on you for using Internet Explorer in the first place, but we'll accept that a lot of people still do)... GIF is still the only available option.
Up until the 16-bit generation you could buy that documentation for a small price - I know, I still have my "Amiga Hardware Reference Manual" gathering dust somewhere at home.
You might want to actually open it up and read it, then. You'd discover that the Amiga was a 32-bit computer.:)
Quit picking on Macromedia. If they can get Flash onto every device in the known universe, more power to them: at least Flash does not try to lock you into a single operating system. The alternative to Flash is the next crop of Microsoft lockware (you think they're going to do XAML/Avalon plugins for Linux or Mac?).
I think it would be wise of the Mozilla developers to begin thinking about their next big innovation in web browsing, so that "switchers" will continue switching even after the inevitable addition of Tabbed Browsing to Internet Explorer.
"This lays the groundwork for instant messaging to become as widespread and useful as e-mail is today," said Taylor Collyer
If it becomes as "widespread and useful as e-mail" then that means I'm going to have spam popping up on my screen every three seconds. Goodbye, Instant Messaging.
In any case, this is all nonsense. AOL, Yahoo, and The Beast should all just implement the server-to-server protocol used by Jabber. It's on the IETF standards track and will eventually be used by everyone who isn't one of those three.
Actually, if one of the big three (probably the smallest of the big three, whichever that is) implemented the protocol, the other two would pretty much have to.
Gates wants the current DVD system to become obsolete because Windows Media 9 is one of the encoder formats used in the new HD-DVD format which is currently in the works. (One more reason to support the competing Blu-Ray format... no MS!)
I would like to submit my first abuse entry. The IP network 131.107.0.0/16 repeatedly pushes onto the Internet a combination of viruses (such as one called "Windows"), spyware (such as one called "Internet Explorer"), and hate speech (particularly against the Linux community).
All network administrators should blackhole this address space.
I dunno... a lot can happen in six years. Microsoft claims a billion Windows users by 2010, but one might consider, on the other hand, Jeff Prothero's prediction that by 2010, Windows will be as dead as CP/M which is based on doublings-over-doublings of Linux market share.
Reality, as always, is probably somewhere in between.
You know how all the Slashbots complain about WINE, saying that it's going to marginalize native Linux applications like OS/2's Windows compatibility layer did?
Well, it cuts both ways, folks.
If an ISV can write POSIX code that builds on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS, where's the motivation to write Win32 (or even WinFX) native code?
Thank you Microsoft, for providing standard API's for a change. Between that and Mono, things are looking good for cross-platform software. Good to see Microsoft doing the right thing. (Now, we know they'll deliberately make this difficult, because it's just not Bill's nature to play nicely, but we'll work around that.)
Slashdot Mirror
It should be painfully obvious by now that Microsoft's current MO (aside from funding the litigious bastards at SCO, and their current astroturf campaign about patents) is to lead everyone in the wrong direction about what "free" means (i.e. gratis instead of libre) and then tear down any claims made by that assumption.
Don't fall into Microsoft's trap. When talking about open source with colleagues, customers, etc. make sure they know about the true benefits. Lower TCO is part of the picture (and it does have a lower TCO when anyone not reciving Bill Buck$ is doing the measurement), but there's also the ability to interchange components at will, and the ability to interchange vendors at will, which gives everyone more leverage with their vendors. With open source, everyone wins except for software companies who have built their businesses around lock-in.
If nothing else, this whole thing should serve as a stellar example of why the phrase "open source" is an order of magnitude more versatile than the ambiguous "free software." There's no confusion as to what it really means.
This dangerous drive (and the resulting accident) happened in Canada. Clearly this will be the catalyzing event that finally will move our lawmakers to declare Canada illegal. This has been a long time in coming. (As Kyle's Mom once said... "It's not even a real country!")
As much as the 'softies love to downplay the significance of the Linux desktop, and dismiss it publicly as insignificant, irrelevant, and unfeasible ... inside the walls of Redmond, they absolutely take it seriously. They know it is a serious long-term threat to their core sources of revenue, and being the financially wealthy but morally bankrupt bunch of criminals that they are, will stop at nothing to kill it.
And here's why. In 1998, anyone running a Linux desktop was a true geek. But every year brings changes, improvements, leaps in usability and application availability. Ask a marketing weasel what this means and they'll tell you that the value proposition of desktop Linux is slowly but continuously improving. Add in the economics and they'll tell you that eventually that value proposition will become too high to ignore.
Remember: there was a time when the PC itself was considered unfeasible. There was just too much momentum behind IBM's mainframes to ever unseat the venerable 3270 terminal from the business desktops of the world. How many of you are viewing Slashdot from a 3270 right now?
I think consumers will be downright insulted by this. Especially if they're not made well aware ahead of time that this is crippleware.
Case in point: Windows 2000/2003 Server "Web Edition." It's a cut-rate server they've made available to hosting companies to compete with Linux. Now and then I've had to help customers with this particular crippleware and hit a brick wall because a feature was disabled. For example, you can't make it a domain controller.
Hopefully this will insult the Asian people and they will redouble their adoption of Linux.
There's enough backstabbing and blame-shifting in modern business that it makes sense to keep emails around anyway. I frequently delete the ones that say "ok, thanks" or something equally as insignificant, but I also keep a "CYA" folder for things I may need to throw back in a customer's face later on when they claim they asked for something different, and I also never empty my "Sent" folder so when the boss comes storming in with a "Why didn't you..." rant, I can pull up the relevant email and say "See, I did."
This should be pretty obvious to anyone who's had a job with email for more than a couple of months. I used to be a good server citizen, keeping my mail store usage nice and tidy, but not anymore.
"AMD welcomes Intel to the world of AMD64, said Ben Williams, director of server and workstation marketing at AMD.
It's kind of funny to watch. Intel is choosing their words very carefully. They're saying things like, the new chip "will run programs currently being developed for AMD's 64-bit processors with very little modification." They absolutely refuse to call the new chip "AMD compatible" even though that's exactly what it is. Intel is having a lot of trouble facing the facts: they poured zillions of dollars and years of R&D into an architecture that nobody wants (Itanium), meanwhile AMD got it right (Opteron) and now they're playing catch-up.
You'd think that Intel, moreso than anyone else, would know that you just can't kill x86.
Every 'softie I've heard from who has seen the Windows code base has said the same thing: it is a labyrinthine collection of objects and subsystems that nobody really understands at a high level. It's actually a miracle that the whole thing builds in the first place. So when they change a few things for a service pack, a dozen other things break.
Microsoft deserves these problems. Their software is too tightly integrated. The benefit of having highly modular software is that problems tend to not spread beyond a single module or subsystem.
This is a good first step. As a second step, I'd like to see IBM add "...and we intend to use our patent portfolio to whack anyone who tries to use their patents against Linux."
Long term, I'd like to see corporate open source participants enter a "patent pool." You want to use OSS? You have to waive your patent rights. Perhaps a new version of the GPL could do to patents what it has already done to copyrights.
And of course, the true solution is that software patents should be abolished entirely. But as long as the Gates/Bush Corporate Empire rules the not-so-free world, that won't happen.
Hmm, I think you've got it wrong. It actually goes something like this:
It's still a rollup and/or a partial solution. OGo doesn't even have an email system in it. OpenXchange rolls in a bunch of existing packages and puts a custom Web front end on it, just like Kolab and Bynari do.
Those interested in a true ground-up implementation of an open source groupware server might want to check out the Citadel project. It's got all the usual email stuff (IMAP, POP, ESMTP), a web front-end written specifically for it, shared calendaring/scheduling, instant messaging, and a database-driven message store (which unlike Exchange, can be backed up hot).
Heh. Intel has been very careful about choosing its words. They're doing press releases that say things like "Xeon 64 will run software currently being developed for the AMD Opteron with very little modification." They categorically refuse to call their new chips "AMD64 compatible" even though that's exactly what they are. They licensed the AMD64 instruction set and renamed it.
Ben Williams of AMD even said, "AMD welcomes Intel to the world of AMD64." Heh.
Meanwhile, commercial Unix vendors are going out of their way to achieve Linux compatibility, at either the source or binary level. Linux is quickly becoming the standard to which other Unices are compared. This means two things:
The big downside of stored procs, from a system administration point of view, is that they make it difficult to migrate to a different brand of database. Let's say your organization just bought a brand spanking new Sun Fire 9990000 and it's got Oracle 20i running on its 512 processors. You've been granted permission to move your application onto it!
Scenario A:
You didn't use stored procs. You migrate the data, change the DSN's on your app tier, and you're done.
Scenario B:
Not only are you a moron for choosing MS SQL Server, you're a double dumbass moron because you wrote lots of stored procs and triggers. Now you can't just move the data because every RDBMS uses a different language for stored procs. If you're lucky, there might be a conversion tool. If you're really lucky, it might even convert 50% or more of your code without errors. But you're in for a lot of work.
"...we share it, and we're going to compete."
... "We don't care. We don't have to. We're Microsoft."
Translation: "We're going to leverage our usual 'bundle it with the OS' approach, because we just can't stand the fact that someone other than us is making money with technology. And if users get annoyed because their two-year-old computer slows down from all the constant indexing of local content, too bad. Keeping our monopoly is more important than delivering the end user experience you want."
As always
Anyone know what the patent encumbrance status of AES is? Will it be usable by open source software?
Let 'em stay on paper. A book printed on dead trees can be re-sold, it can be put on a shelf and read again later, it can be traded in a book club... the possibilities are endless.
Move books to digital and you'll have the "Intellectual Property" police hounding everyone. They'll want you to pay to read a book once, and you'll forfeit all other rights. Who wants DRM infecting literature?
The usual crowd of nincompoop Slashbots are going to crow "They should just leave it out! Everyone should use PNG anyway!!"
... GIF is still the only available option.
Let me answer that in advance by reminding everyone that GIF is a useful format. Everything can read it and display it. It's been around for two decades and is now a completely open and unencumbered standard.
And let's not forget that when you need to display an image that is non-lossy, and supports transparency, and displays properly in Internet Explorer (shame on you for using Internet Explorer in the first place, but we'll accept that a lot of people still do)
Up until the 16-bit generation you could buy that documentation for a small price - I know, I still have my "Amiga Hardware Reference Manual" gathering dust somewhere at home.
:)
You might want to actually open it up and read it, then. You'd discover that the Amiga was a 32-bit computer.
Quit picking on Macromedia. If they can get Flash onto every device in the known universe, more power to them: at least Flash does not try to lock you into a single operating system. The alternative to Flash is the next crop of Microsoft lockware (you think they're going to do XAML/Avalon plugins for Linux or Mac?).
I'll take Flash over the alternatives any day, thank you. And besides, the Flash format is openly documented. What more could you want?
I think it would be wise of the Mozilla developers to begin thinking about their next big innovation in web browsing, so that "switchers" will continue switching even after the inevitable addition of Tabbed Browsing to Internet Explorer.
"This lays the groundwork for instant messaging to become as widespread and useful as e-mail is today," said Taylor Collyer
If it becomes as "widespread and useful as e-mail" then that means I'm going to have spam popping up on my screen every three seconds. Goodbye, Instant Messaging.
In any case, this is all nonsense. AOL, Yahoo, and The Beast should all just implement the server-to-server protocol used by Jabber. It's on the IETF standards track and will eventually be used by everyone who isn't one of those three.
Actually, if one of the big three (probably the smallest of the big three, whichever that is) implemented the protocol, the other two would pretty much have to.
Gates wants the current DVD system to become obsolete because Windows Media 9 is one of the encoder formats used in the new HD-DVD format which is currently in the works. (One more reason to support the competing Blu-Ray format ... no MS!)
I would like to submit my first abuse entry. The IP network 131.107.0.0/16 repeatedly pushes onto the Internet a combination of viruses (such as one called "Windows"), spyware (such as one called "Internet Explorer"), and hate speech (particularly against the Linux community).
All network administrators should blackhole this address space.
I dunno ... a lot can happen in six years. Microsoft claims a billion Windows users by 2010, but one might consider, on the other hand, Jeff Prothero's prediction that by 2010, Windows will be as dead as CP/M which is based on doublings-over-doublings of Linux market share.
Reality, as always, is probably somewhere in between.
You know how all the Slashbots complain about WINE, saying that it's going to marginalize native Linux applications like OS/2's Windows compatibility layer did?
Well, it cuts both ways, folks.
If an ISV can write POSIX code that builds on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS, where's the motivation to write Win32 (or even WinFX) native code?
Thank you Microsoft, for providing standard API's for a change. Between that and Mono, things are looking good for cross-platform software. Good to see Microsoft doing the right thing. (Now, we know they'll deliberately make this difficult, because it's just not Bill's nature to play nicely, but we'll work around that.)