More nonsense from Gates. I doubt anyone's still listening to him at this point (except US Republicans, who only listen to him because he keeps feeding them megabucks in payo... er, brib... er, campaign contributions [yeah, that's it]).
Open source kills Microsoft jobs, maybe. It creates jobs in Malaysia (or any other place where Gates is speaking, unless it's on his own corporate campus). It creates the vibrant, multifaceted, competitive atmosphere that made the computer world such an interesting and innovative place before the Microsoft monoculture took over.
Netscape is dead and they're still winning the browser war. How is this possible? Well, consider what Netscape's goal was -- and why Microsoft reacted so violently to prevent it: Netscape wanted the Web, not Windows, to be the primary platform for new applications.
Microsoft may have obliterated Netscape in market share, and eventually forced them out of business, but look around. Every year, more and more applications have moved to the web. We are entering an era where it doesn't matter what operating system is on your desktop as long as it has a web browser.
Netscape wanted to move apps to the Web. Microsoft wanted to keep everything tied to Windows. By that measure, what do you see happening out there? Netscape is still winning the browser war. Microsoft knows this all too well, which is why they're now trying to marginalize non-Microsoft browsers by adding proprietary formats like XAML.
IBM's monopoly was broken not by a competitor who beat them in mainframe market share, but by a paradigm shift. The same is happening to Microsoft. The very fact that there are already a few million Linux desktops out there -- and that they're doing real work -- proves this.
Some may wish to flame me for this, but, how is that any different than how the U.S. views themselves on the world stage. It has been a long standing view of mine that Microsoft is to U.S. citizens, what the U.S. government is to the world. You're correct, and as a US citizen, I'm ashamed of this behavior by our supposedly (but not actually) representative government.
It's childish and stupid of either organization to act that way.
This pretty much means that the popup window will be officially dead in a year's time.
Actually, it simply means that window.open() popups will be dead in a year's time. It's an arms race, just like spam vs. antispam. Popups will simply move from JavaScript to CSS. The popup window appears as a CSS layer which is above the layer showing the main page.
To see an example of this, go to http://www.tek-tips.com. The first thing you'll see is a popup sailing across your screen and bouncing a couple of times off the bottom before giving you the opportunity to close it.
This is the near future of annoying adversiting, folks.
Over the years I've read several books and opinion pieces on Microsoft and their success. "Microsoft as the underdog" was a theme in many of them. I guess it's their strategy for motivating their workforce.
I've had lengthy discussions with a number of different 'Softies about this.
Keep in mind that Microsoft has a very consistent and very strong corporate culture. Everyone there thinks the way Gates wants them to.
The people over there truly believe that they are somehow "saving the world" with their software, and that they are the only ones capable of doing so.
It should be patently obvious that if Windows XP requires that much effort to use securely, it means that the software itself is insecure by nature, and you probably shouldn't be using it.
As a famous computer once said: "The only winning move is not to play."
It would seem to me that this is fairly typical of Intel software devleopment for the last 15 years -- making sure that there is publically available code highlighting how to do cool things with their CPUs.
True, but funding UML seems kind of curious. After all, if you can virtualize, then theoretically you're going to be buying fewer of those Intel processors. So, what are those bunny-suited Intellers up to?
I'm still a little skeptical about using a Microsoft-owned technology on Linux, but perhaps this is just what we need to get ISV's on board. I'm going to guess that the "Mono ABI" is going to be less of a moving target than the "Linux ABI" has been. That would be very ironic.
...and release the plug-ins themselves (hear Flash) under an open source license.
Not as easy as it sounds, even if they wanted to do it. Flash player contains stuff they licensed from third parties (audio and video codecs are the best example).
Someone else replied to the above comment and suggested that a bigger problem was that the Linux ABI changes too often. That poster got modded down as a troll, and I'm not sure why, because it's a very good point. Linux could be adopted by the mainstream much faster if you could download "the Linux version" of a program and be guaranteed that it would work. And that goes double for device drivers.
Hearing sounds from Saturn is nothing new. My 1997 SL1 (like most old Saturns) is VERY noisy... you can hear it coming from a mile away. Step on the gas and it sounds like the power steering pump is going to pop through the hood.
It's great that Sun has GPL'ed this desktop, but it has absolutely zero chance of mainstream Linux adoption. Why? Because it requires Java to run, and the Java environment itself is not open source. Remember the whole KDE debacle about Qt not being free enough? Multiply that by a few million times and you'll see why Looking Glass won't make it past "gee, that's cool" in the Linux world.
Open source speaks chiefly to businesses about a development methodology and purposefully pushes aside software freedom because that movement's founders believed that freedom talk would scare away the businesses they wanted to talk to most.Open Source considers freedom as a means to an end, while Free Software considers freedom as an end in itself. So what? There's room for both. They're both pushing for adoption of the same unencumbered, shareable software. Neither movement hurts the other. So why complain about it?
Would you tell that to a holocust survivor? Someone that lost a spouse in the twin towers?
Yes, these Micorsoft's crimes are less important than that.
I disagree. The number of people affected by Microsoft's crimes against humanity number in the hundreds of millions. I'd even go as far as to say that if Bill Gates had been inside one of the Twin Towers when they fell, the other lives lost would have been worth it.
This should be viewed as a precedent. The next time RIAA sues file-swappers, they should be paid in any old junk those folks happen to have around. Dead car on blocks? Value: $10,000. Couple of old 486's lying around? Value: $2,000 each. Spoiled potato salad in the back of the fridge? You get the idea...
I want Google Instant Messenger. And I want it this year. Google has proven that they are the Internet company that can innovate (instead of just talking about innovation, like a certain company whom I will not name but is run by Bill Gates). Now it's time to do something innovative in the Instant Messenger arena. And perhaps if they were the first "big name" to tie into Jabber, the other three would be forced to do so as well!
The thing that's truly remarkable about non-US governments making the switch to Linux, is that they now consider independence from MS as an end in itself. Do you realize the implications of that? It means that they're thinking the way much of the existing Linux community does -- that even if Microsoft manages to fix the bugs in their software, even if they lower the price, even if they do all these things -- being locked-in to Microsoft is still a problem, and a problem that must be eliminated.
HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray. It's time for another format war. Consumers don't want this -- especially when regular DVD is "good enough" for most of them, and from their perspective, DVD is only a few years old. VHS got a couple decades of use before DVD showed up on the market, and when it did, the improvement in picture and sound quality (not to mention taking up less space) was enough to get consumers to adopt the format.
Now they expect consumers to shift again? No. It's too soon. And the fact that there's a format war on top of all that, will make both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray about as successful as SACD and DVD-A have been in replacing the good old audio CD -- i.e. not successful at all except for a handful of high-end enthusiasts.
Without a doubt, nothing brings people together like a Citadel system. Since it's focused on people and not file leeching, you get a stronger sense of community.
What's more, modern Citadel systems give you telnet and web-based access, so the old-skool BBS'ers can have their 80x24 fun while the newbies can partake of the community from the comfort of their favorite browser. The e-mail system is built-in, sporting SMTP/POP/IMAP, and you get an instant messenger and a chat system completely integrated. It's a totally self-contained package that gives you the community-oriented site you're looking for.
If you want to see one in action, just click on the BBS link in my signature. I've been doing this for 16 years and loving it. BBS's are not dead, by any means.
He's right -- the memory footprint needs to be addressed. This could potentially be one of those areas where the open source method can really shine -- you have people interested in making it prettier, more functional, etc. and you have other people that are efficiency freaks, looking for the memory hogs and slimming them down.
I'm curious as to how much of that big memory footprint (say, on a typical GNOME desktop) is code, and how much is user data. The reason I'm curious is because if the bulk of it is code (do an ldd of your favorite desktop app and see how many shared libs are linked in!) then you have a very compelling case for multiusser. All those aging doze98/NT4 desktops can become LTSP thinclients, and you put all the apps on a big server. Yes, the server needs to have a lot of memory, but not (256 MB * number of users) because all the program space is shared. You've got one copy of glib, one copy of gtk, etc. for the entire user community, instead of one copy resident on each desktop. As long as everyone is running mostly the same set of apps, the per-user delta for memory usage on the server becomes merely the amount consumed by user data.
Yes, Linux is getting bloated and we need to address that. However, when thinking about Linux as a Windows replacement, it's crucial that you have to play up Linux's strengths rather than simply rip-and-replace and try to have Linux poorly emulate Windows's strengths. One of Linux's biggest strengths is its powerful mix of good multiuser capabilities plus good network transparency at every layer of the system. This (along with lower acquisition costs, of course) is probably Linux's best available ticket to the mainstream desktop.
As much as we all hate SCO, unfortunately they are right this time. Solaris is built from the original Unix code. There is a direct descendence here, and SCO is absolutely within its rights to tell Sun that they can't sublicense it (which is essentially what open sourcing the code would do, assuming that it's a DFSG/OSD compliant license).
On the other hand, if Sun is in cahoots with SCO, as some here suggest, then perhaps they are shooting themselves in the collective foot today. Solaris is demonstrably descended from System V -- Sun programmers had all the original code to work from. It only strengthens the contrast between Solaris's development and Linux's development; i.e. the Linux developers did not have access to System V. Perhaps someone will subpoena Solaris code eventually, and show the court what a derivative work would really look like, contrasted with Linux, built from scratch and looking very different.
Low end processors, old processors, crap processors... the problem is that people still have full-blown computers on their desks. Maybe if you're Joe Seven-Pak (you know, Joe Six-Pak's poweruser cousin) and you edit your home videos on your PC, it makes sense to have the latest and greatest. But I find it completely stupid -- actually, I find it downright obscene -- that businesses with bloody acres full of cubicle dwellers, have not embraced network computing solutions like LTSP or even Citrix. If it weren't for the damned status quo being continously hammered into people's minds by Intel and Microsoft, maybe people would realize that keeping power off the desktop and centralized behind the glass is the best way to lower the TCO of a multiuser environment.
I bet all of your karma that if anybody else thought up XAML, you would be worshipping it.
If anybody else thought up XAML, it would be likely done in a way that promotes open standards, cross-platform interoperability, and lack of potential patent encumbrance.
The very fact that Microsoft is doing it means we are almost certainly looking at the exact opposite. If XAML takes hold, Microsoft will wield it as a cudgel to try to get all those pesky non-Windows, non-IE clients off of the Internet.
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More nonsense from Gates. I doubt anyone's still listening to him at this point (except US Republicans, who only listen to him because he keeps feeding them megabucks in payo... er, brib... er, campaign contributions [yeah, that's it]).
Open source kills Microsoft jobs, maybe. It creates jobs in Malaysia (or any other place where Gates is speaking, unless it's on his own corporate campus). It creates the vibrant, multifaceted, competitive atmosphere that made the computer world such an interesting and innovative place before the Microsoft monoculture took over.
Netscape is dead and they're still winning the browser war. How is this possible? Well, consider what Netscape's goal was -- and why Microsoft reacted so violently to prevent it: Netscape wanted the Web, not Windows, to be the primary platform for new applications.
Microsoft may have obliterated Netscape in market share, and eventually forced them out of business, but look around. Every year, more and more applications have moved to the web. We are entering an era where it doesn't matter what operating system is on your desktop as long as it has a web browser.
Netscape wanted to move apps to the Web. Microsoft wanted to keep everything tied to Windows. By that measure, what do you see happening out there? Netscape is still winning the browser war. Microsoft knows this all too well, which is why they're now trying to marginalize non-Microsoft browsers by adding proprietary formats like XAML.
IBM's monopoly was broken not by a competitor who beat them in mainframe market share, but by a paradigm shift. The same is happening to Microsoft. The very fact that there are already a few million Linux desktops out there -- and that they're doing real work -- proves this.
Name : 2004-05-OSS-Briefing.doc
These "open source GIS" people need to learn a few things about "open source software." Presentation in Microsoft Word format? Faux pas!!
Some may wish to flame me for this, but, how is that any different than how the U.S. views themselves on the world stage.
It has been a long standing view of mine that Microsoft is to U.S. citizens, what the U.S. government is to the world.
You're correct, and as a US citizen, I'm ashamed of this behavior by our supposedly (but not actually) representative government.
It's childish and stupid of either organization to act that way.
This pretty much means that the popup window will be officially dead in a year's time.
Actually, it simply means that window.open() popups will be dead in a year's time. It's an arms race, just like spam vs. antispam. Popups will simply move from JavaScript to CSS. The popup window appears as a CSS layer which is above the layer showing the main page.
To see an example of this, go to http://www.tek-tips.com. The first thing you'll see is a popup sailing across your screen and bouncing a couple of times off the bottom before giving you the opportunity to close it.
This is the near future of annoying adversiting, folks.
Over the years I've read several books and opinion pieces on Microsoft and their success. "Microsoft as the underdog" was a theme in many of them. I guess it's their strategy for motivating their workforce.
I've had lengthy discussions with a number of different 'Softies about this.
Keep in mind that Microsoft has a very consistent and very strong corporate culture. Everyone there thinks the way Gates wants them to.
The people over there truly believe that they are somehow "saving the world" with their software, and that they are the only ones capable of doing so.
It's truly bizarre.
This is not a troll.
It should be patently obvious that if Windows XP requires that much effort to use securely, it means that the software itself is insecure by nature, and you probably shouldn't be using it.
As a famous computer once said: "The only winning move is not to play."
It would seem to me that this is fairly typical of Intel software devleopment for the last 15 years -- making sure that there is publically available code highlighting how to do cool things with their CPUs.
True, but funding UML seems kind of curious. After all, if you can virtualize, then theoretically you're going to be buying fewer of those Intel processors. So, what are those bunny-suited Intellers up to?
I'm still a little skeptical about using a Microsoft-owned technology on Linux, but perhaps this is just what we need to get ISV's on board. I'm going to guess that the "Mono ABI" is going to be less of a moving target than the "Linux ABI" has been. That would be very ironic.
...and release the plug-ins themselves (hear Flash) under an open source license.
Not as easy as it sounds, even if they wanted to do it. Flash player contains stuff they licensed from third parties (audio and video codecs are the best example).
Someone else replied to the above comment and suggested that a bigger problem was that the Linux ABI changes too often. That poster got modded down as a troll, and I'm not sure why, because it's a very good point. Linux could be adopted by the mainstream much faster if you could download "the Linux version" of a program and be guaranteed that it would work. And that goes double for device drivers.
Hearing sounds from Saturn is nothing new. My 1997 SL1 (like most old Saturns) is VERY noisy ... you can hear it coming from a mile away. Step on the gas and it sounds like the power steering pump is going to pop through the hood.
It's great that Sun has GPL'ed this desktop, but it has absolutely zero chance of mainstream Linux adoption. Why? Because it requires Java to run, and the Java environment itself is not open source. Remember the whole KDE debacle about Qt not being free enough? Multiply that by a few million times and you'll see why Looking Glass won't make it past "gee, that's cool" in the Linux world.
Open source speaks chiefly to businesses about a development methodology and purposefully pushes aside software freedom because that movement's founders believed that freedom talk would scare away the businesses they wanted to talk to most.Open Source considers freedom as a means to an end, while Free Software considers freedom as an end in itself. So what? There's room for both. They're both pushing for adoption of the same unencumbered, shareable software. Neither movement hurts the other. So why complain about it?
Would you tell that to a holocust survivor? Someone that lost a spouse in the twin towers?
Yes, these Micorsoft's crimes are less important than that.
I disagree. The number of people affected by Microsoft's crimes against humanity number in the hundreds of millions. I'd even go as far as to say that if Bill Gates had been inside one of the Twin Towers when they fell, the other lives lost would have been worth it.
This should be viewed as a precedent. The next time RIAA sues file-swappers, they should be paid in any old junk those folks happen to have around. Dead car on blocks? Value: $10,000. Couple of old 486's lying around? Value: $2,000 each. Spoiled potato salad in the back of the fridge? You get the idea...
I want Google Instant Messenger. And I want it this year. Google has proven that they are the Internet company that can innovate (instead of just talking about innovation, like a certain company whom I will not name but is run by Bill Gates). Now it's time to do something innovative in the Instant Messenger arena. And perhaps if they were the first "big name" to tie into Jabber, the other three would be forced to do so as well!
The thing that's truly remarkable about non-US governments making the switch to Linux, is that they now consider independence from MS as an end in itself. Do you realize the implications of that? It means that they're thinking the way much of the existing Linux community does -- that even if Microsoft manages to fix the bugs in their software, even if they lower the price, even if they do all these things -- being locked-in to Microsoft is still a problem, and a problem that must be eliminated.
This is truly an important point.
Sorry folks, you're not allowed to do TODO lists. That has been patented by Microsoft.
Perhaps you should consider circumventing the patent by making a list of "Stuff I gotta remember not to forget" ?
UnixWare 7.1.4 and the new Smallfoot embedded Unix products are shipping now
Wow, the GNOME project stole code from SCO too? What will we learn next?!?!
HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray. It's time for another format war. Consumers don't want this -- especially when regular DVD is "good enough" for most of them, and from their perspective, DVD is only a few years old. VHS got a couple decades of use before DVD showed up on the market, and when it did, the improvement in picture and sound quality (not to mention taking up less space) was enough to get consumers to adopt the format.
Now they expect consumers to shift again? No. It's too soon. And the fact that there's a format war on top of all that, will make both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray about as successful as SACD and DVD-A have been in replacing the good old audio CD -- i.e. not successful at all except for a handful of high-end enthusiasts.
Without a doubt, nothing brings people together like a Citadel system. Since it's focused on people and not file leeching, you get a stronger sense of community.
What's more, modern Citadel systems give you telnet and web-based access, so the old-skool BBS'ers can have their 80x24 fun while the newbies can partake of the community from the comfort of their favorite browser. The e-mail system is built-in, sporting SMTP/POP/IMAP, and you get an instant messenger and a chat system completely integrated. It's a totally self-contained package that gives you the community-oriented site you're looking for.
If you want to see one in action, just click on the BBS link in my signature. I've been doing this for 16 years and loving it. BBS's are not dead, by any means.
He's right -- the memory footprint needs to be addressed. This could potentially be one of those areas where the open source method can really shine -- you have people interested in making it prettier, more functional, etc. and you have other people that are efficiency freaks, looking for the memory hogs and slimming them down.
I'm curious as to how much of that big memory footprint (say, on a typical GNOME desktop) is code, and how much is user data. The reason I'm curious is because if the bulk of it is code (do an ldd of your favorite desktop app and see how many shared libs are linked in!) then you have a very compelling case for multiusser. All those aging doze98/NT4 desktops can become LTSP thinclients, and you put all the apps on a big server. Yes, the server needs to have a lot of memory, but not (256 MB * number of users) because all the program space is shared. You've got one copy of glib, one copy of gtk, etc. for the entire user community, instead of one copy resident on each desktop. As long as everyone is running mostly the same set of apps, the per-user delta for memory usage on the server becomes merely the amount consumed by user data.
Yes, Linux is getting bloated and we need to address that. However, when thinking about Linux as a Windows replacement, it's crucial that you have to play up Linux's strengths rather than simply rip-and-replace and try to have Linux poorly emulate Windows's strengths. One of Linux's biggest strengths is its powerful mix of good multiuser capabilities plus good network transparency at every layer of the system. This (along with lower acquisition costs, of course) is probably Linux's best available ticket to the mainstream desktop.
As much as we all hate SCO, unfortunately they are right this time. Solaris is built from the original Unix code. There is a direct descendence here, and SCO is absolutely within its rights to tell Sun that they can't sublicense it (which is essentially what open sourcing the code would do, assuming that it's a DFSG/OSD compliant license).
On the other hand, if Sun is in cahoots with SCO, as some here suggest, then perhaps they are shooting themselves in the collective foot today. Solaris is demonstrably descended from System V -- Sun programmers had all the original code to work from. It only strengthens the contrast between Solaris's development and Linux's development; i.e. the Linux developers did not have access to System V. Perhaps someone will subpoena Solaris code eventually, and show the court what a derivative work would really look like, contrasted with Linux, built from scratch and looking very different.
Low end processors, old processors, crap processors ... the problem is that people still have full-blown computers on their desks. Maybe if you're Joe Seven-Pak (you know, Joe Six-Pak's poweruser cousin) and you edit your home videos on your PC, it makes sense to have the latest and greatest. But I find it completely stupid -- actually, I find it downright obscene -- that businesses with bloody acres full of cubicle dwellers, have not embraced network computing solutions like LTSP or even Citrix. If it weren't for the damned status quo being continously hammered into people's minds by Intel and Microsoft, maybe people would realize that keeping power off the desktop and centralized behind the glass is the best way to lower the TCO of a multiuser environment.
I bet all of your karma that if anybody else thought up XAML, you would be worshipping it.
If anybody else thought up XAML, it would be likely done in a way that promotes open standards, cross-platform interoperability, and lack of potential patent encumbrance.
The very fact that Microsoft is doing it means we are almost certainly looking at the exact opposite. If XAML takes hold, Microsoft will wield it as a cudgel to try to get all those pesky non-Windows, non-IE clients off of the Internet.