Let's not forget Citadel, which when finished will be not only a calendaring server, but e-mail as well -- a full-blown Exchange killer.
Y'know what the really key piece is, that no one seems to be able to do? The ability to look at one of your peers' free/busy times, and find free slots to schedule events. Exchange does this by publishing, at the user's option, a version of the user's calendar that has the actual appointment data removed - you only see the blocks that are marked "busy" (and the blocks that are marked "tentative".
Regrettably, the RFC's for calendaring don't contain any standard protocol for doing this. There is an RFC for the data format, and the RFC for sending invites, RSVP's, etc... but we need one more RFC for a calendar access protocol.
I, for one, am happy to see that Mozilla will be gaining a calendar client. It will allow those of us working on the Citadel project to work with the Mozilla calendar client on all platforms, without having to reverse-engineer Microsoft's protocol.
You shouldn't be using MSN or Hotmail anyway! When you go to MSN or HotMail, you are putting money directly into Bill's pocket. Advertising revenue etc. drives these sites' profits. DON'T GO THERE AT ALL. There is absolutely no excuse to be using these sites. There are many good Microsoft-free alternatives.
Well, if you think about it, Richard Stallman is always talking about freedom, and talking about talking about freedom... presumably this means that you have the freedom to telephone Richard Stallman in the middle of the night and ask him to give you free tech support for Emacs. I don't think he has any choice other than to provide it for you.
Here's a simple exercise: go to the nearest Windows machine, preferably one loaded with lots of apps of various vintages, and delete all but the newest VBRUN*.DLL, MFC*.DLL, etc. Then see how many of your apps work.
When Microsoft releases new widget sets, API's, etc., older applications do not automagically use them. Having, for example, MFC 2 and MFC 3 on your system isn't any different from having Qt 2 and Qt 3 on your system.
What Microsoft did get right, is the installation procedures: have multiple libraries sitting on the same machine if necessary, but don't bother the user about it -- it's not their problem.
I've got news for ya, folks: they're already doing this. There is an entire database marketing industry that does nothing but correlate data from different sources, build profiles on individual consumers, and then figure out your purchasing habits so they can predict your next move and supply you with the appropriate advertising.
Did you know that when you subscribe to a magazine, the stupid little cards that they stick in there are actually targeted specifically to you? It's true -- you and your neighbor could subscribe to the same magazine, but you'll get stuffed with different cards. The process is called selective binding and it's now a common practice in the database marketing universe.
Don't think for a minute that Big Brother isn't already tying in to this wealth of information. The addition of a unique ID number for each individual would merely be a formality at this point.
In a perfect world, it'd be nice to just go and do your own thing while ignoring the competition. This is especially true when you're playing in a free/open world and you don't have to worry about making money.
Unfortunately, that only works when everyone agrees to it.
The war against Microsoft is primarily a defensive one for Linux. Microsoft quite clearly is all about destroying everyone else. That includes Linux. Linux is not a Microsoft product and must therefore die. When you have a powerful multibillion monopoly out to end your life, you have to go to war. You can't ignore them or you'll wake up one day and find out that the hardware you run on and the network you connect to, once open territories for you to build your playground in, are now owned by the big bully and you have no choice but to shut down.
Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer deserve to die. Slowly and painfully. But that has nothing to do with Linux. The fact that they are putting enormous resources into making non-Microsoft technologies essentially unusable does have to do with Linux, though. It means that the Linux world must respond.
Those of you who remember the IBM antitrust years may recall one of the outcomes of that debacle: IBM was forced to unbundle its services from its products, and forced to document its interfaces. The birth of a reasonably fair aftermarket soon followed.
Let's home this happens to Microsoft too, and they have to completely remove all mentions of Passport/Hotmail from Windows, as well as IE and Media Player.
This spec could be terribly useful for anyone who wants to write a program to migrate a user's e-mail (or even their settings, etc.) to a new service.
Or better yet -- think about this: with this spec, an AOL module could be written for fetchmail. Suck down the mail from that old AOL account and deliver it via SMTP. Cool, eh?
One thing that I like about Jason is that he doesn't equivocate "BBS" with "the past" the way some other people (*cough*CmdrTaco*cough*) do. The BBS community is definitely alive and well; it's moved to the Internet, of course -- dialup is what's dead. And with modern BBS software giving users a choice of text or web interfaces, there's little chance that it's going to go away anytime soon. (Click this link to go to UNCENSORED! BBS, which I run on a Linux box in my basement with a DSL circuit.)
The role of BBS's is what has changed. The "make the sysop some money" boards all turned into ISP's in the mid-1990's. The "download information/drivers/etc." BBS's were properly replaced by web sites. But the online community BBS's are still here. The ones run by people who love to get a great group of people online to enjoy each other's company. The places where spirited, friendly discussion is the meat and bones of the medium. No, it's not exactly like it was a decade ago, but few things are. Some things aren't quite as charming, but some things are actually better. No more endless busy signals to get on your favorite BBS, since the Internet is by its nature multiuser (right now I'm counting 10 people logged into my BBS).
With the mainstream Internet becoming more and more the playground of the corporate elite, I'd expect small, hobbyist-operated sites like BBS's to become even more popular, as users get disgusted with having pre-packaged crap shoved at them through the big channels, and go around looking for something a little more "folksy."
Having the national Big Brother database running on Oracle would be a huge bee in Microsoft's bonnet. Perhaps they should go for it just on that basis.
Perception is reality. While those of us in the Free World see DIVX for what it really is -- a patent-unencumbered, open-systems codec -- we are the minority. Listen to folks in Windows circles talk about digital video. Since DIVX doesn't come from Microsoft or RealNetworks, they refer to it as a "warez codec". That's a loaded phrase, but it's bandied about quite often. It implies that its only use is for bypassing the DRM in corporate formats. That's definitely the way the intellectual property police want people to see it, too. It's up to us to educate the drooling masses.
Hmm... considering how difficult it would be to implement digital rights management on a general-purpose computing device such as a PC, one must wonder how they intend to implement it.
What if it's done in software? Or, what if that DRM hardware has to be driven by hooks in the operating system -- and if you use an operating system that doesn't have those hooks, the DRM hardware sits idle?
This would essentially turn the SSSCA into a law prohibiting the sale of computers with free operating systems, or with no operating systems at all --- a dream come true for Microsoft.
Hopefully, this little bit of history will replay itself.
IBM took an open standard (the ISA bus) and tried to take it closed (the MCA bus) so they'd put an impenetrable lock on the market. The industry responded by saying "to hell with you, IBM; we're all going to EISA (and later, PCI)." Who's playing the close-it-up game now? Microsoft, of course. The Internet currnently runs on open standards, but Microsoft's 'MCA bus' is the.NET framework. They're putting the squeeze on, in an attempt to lock it all up once and for all. Hopefully the market will respond to.NET in the same way it responded to MCA: evil empire loyalists may adopt it, but everyone else will go running to some other, non-empire-controlled, open standard(s). J2EE, Linux, it's all there and it all works.
Over at MSNBC.. ( yah yah just ignore the first two letters)
Impossible. Ignoring the first two letters is foolish. Clicking on MSN sites puts revenue directly into Microsoft's coffers. Revenue that they will, without a doubt, use to hurt you if you are a member of the non-Microsoft community. --
Attempting to measure how fast a computer can go by its CPU's clock speed is tantamount to measuring how fast a car can go by its engine's horsepower. There are many more factors at play here.
Let's start with the whole RISC vs. CISC thing. Everyone knows that RISC is more efficient; the only thing that has kept CISC alive this long is backwards compatibility with the Wintel juggernaut. You develop a lean, efficient instruction set, then you write compiler back ends that take advantage of it.
Also keep in mind that Sun's motherboard designs are true performers. The path between the CPU, memory, and bus are designed to move data around in ways that just aren't possible with Intel.
Did you know that SPARC is more or less an "open" CPU design? It was designed to be a multi-vendor instruction set, one that would be 'common' without having one vendor calling all the shots. Read www.sparc.org for more details.
This is a very intelligent move on the part of AOL. Keep in mind that Windows XP is about to ship, and it's going to include MSN Instant Messenger. AOL knows that people are going to adopt MSN Instant Messenger because of the path-of-least-resistance factor (witness the dominance of IE due to its bundling with Windows).
Why is this important? Because of the interoperability nature of instant messaging.
Anyone who does IM knows that IM users hang out in packs. You gather together your circle of buddies and you all use the same IM system, because the different systems don't talk to each other. Most groups use AIM, some use ICQ or Yahoo Pager, some use MSN. (I don't use any of them, because all of my buddies hang out on the same BBS and we use the instant messenger built into its software.)
AOL wants to avoid a situation in which an entire group of buddies has to move from AIM to MSN-IM because some or most of them are using MSN-IM. If there's interoperability between systems, AOL gets to keep some of the users.
This is a very smart move. AOL knows it can't keep all of the users. AOL also knows that you just don't get into a market share war with Microsoft when Microsoft is playing the bundling card.
I just hope that the interoperability standard is an open one (like e-mail is, with SMTP) and anyone can write a system that ties in... rather than requiring "peering agreements" that only let the big boys play. --
Despite the fact that some people here don't like AOL, this is good news... and here's why.
Amazon is a very high profile e-commerce site. People pay attention to what Amazon is doing... both technology people and business people. Amazon is perceived as a leader. And now that they're hooked up with AOL, the 'leader' will most certainly not become a Passport/Hailstorm site.
I've seen signs of an AOL/Netscape equivalent to that, actually. I'd be happy to see Amazon be part of that family. Not because I'd use it (I wouldn't), but because it would establish that Passport isn't the only game in town. Web sites could end up offering their users a choice of centralized authentication/payment services, much like you can walk into any store and pay with your choice of major credit cards today. Imagine: "We accept Microsoft Passport, AOL [whatever], GNU [whatever], or self pay..."
If you look at the cost breakdown of a multi-company service, you'll find that the carrier makes the bulk of the money. I have DSL at home, and I found that of the $50 per month that I pay, the carrier (Verizon) gets $35 of it, and my ISP (Acecape, who I highly recommend) gets the other $15.
AOLTW really has nothing to worry about here -- if anything, it means they get a good sized chunk of lucrative wholesale business. And they picked a good bunch of partners -- companies like Earthlink pride themselves on providing little more than raw connectivity: a market segment which has very little intersection with AOL's customer base. The typical AOL customer is unsophisticated and wants to have his/her hand held through the entire online experience.
Possibly most important of all is that this arrangement conveniently excludes Microsoft from the picture. MSN is the biggest threat to AOL right now, and since AOL is one of the few companies left that can hold its own against Microsoft, seeing them remain strong is vital to the industry, whether you use/like their services or not. --
Go ahead and mod this into the toilet if you want to, but it's a serious criticism and something I feel strongly about:
The LSB is not enough to offer a single target for ISV's.
It is missing two important things:
A standard package format (RPM or DEB)
A standard desktop framework (KDE or GNOME)
Until the coordinators of the LSB get "ballsy" enough to actually dictate these things (and rest assured it will anger 50 percent of the Linux community), we still do not have a single platform target for app installations.
If you look at the ISV's who have ventured into Linux so far, the single target is (and I believe, until these issues are resolved, will remain) Red Hat.
When users install desktop apps, they expect the following things to happen:
The installer needs to be easily startable (ok, we might be doing ok there)
Icons and menu items are automatically added to the desktop
Resources such as printers, fonts, etc. need to be connected to automatically
If updated system libraries or components are required, find them and offer the opportunity to install them
The LSB is a good start, but it's not a comprehensive binary target. I believe that you can't make everyone happy -- some truly serious decisions such as package manager and desktop framework need to be made. --
Compaq bought DEC for one reason and one reason only: the service organization. DEC already had a worldwide organization of service engineers on staff, and a well-oiled machine to keep it all working. In order to tackle the enterprise market, Compaq needed that, and it was easier to buy DEC than to create it themselves.
What they really didn't want was DEC's technology. Those of you who were paying attention at the time might recall that Compaq initially told their Tru64 UNIX customers that they were going to force-migrate them all to Windows NT. This sounded good for a while, until the customers shouted back, "Screw you, we're going to Sun!" That made them back off.
Perhaps Compaq has now decided that it's time to finally let go of Alpha -- a technology that they feel is "baggage" when their bread and butter is Wintel. Itanium is clearly their desired destination. The only reason they give credit to Linux is because right now it's the only operating system that actually runs on Itanium.
It's a shame, I like Compaq's hardware -- I've always found it to be very well-built (albeit proprietary in places where it shouldn't be) -- but their dedication to the Wintel monoculture is quite unattractive. --
The same thing happened with the product called "SuSE Email Server." It turned out to just be Postfix, Cyrus, and some other things pre-integrated and shipped in a nice-looking box bundled with a support agreement. Considering the magnitude of writing a database, I'd expect Red Hat's offering to be something similar. They didn't survive the Linux company shakeout and turn a profit by being stupid. --
Fortunately, this is a sector of the industry in which competition still exists. The consumer will ultimately choose whichever product delivers the most value. This will probably come in the form of a box that does not depend on a subscription service and can store data locally. Ideally, the "guide" data will come from a place where it is already being paid for, such as the program guide included with DirecTV service. All they have to do is figure out some way to export the program guide from the DirecTV receiver.
On the other hand, this is a market that Microsoft is entering, so perhaps they'll simply tell consumers what to do (and buy, and view...) by eliminating competition. --
This type of thing has been going on with magazine subscriptions for a very long time. I've done some work with database marketing companies and they scrutinize their customers (and potential customers) very closely using sophisticated software and big mainframes.
The result is a technique called "selective binding" which determines exactly which half-dozen annoying little cards fall out of your magazine when you open it. You and your neighbor might both have subscriptions to Basket Weaving Digest magazine, but if the database marketing company knows that you're a drinker and your neighbor is a smoker (for example), you'll receive different inserts with different advertising.
It's very lucrative for both advertising companies and the database marketing companies they work with. It's not surprising that television is moving this way as well. --
The publishing industry is probably drooling over the opportunity to publish EBooks using digital paper. And why not? With the data in digital format, it looks and quacks more like "software" than like a book. Enter the DMCA, "Intellectual Property" lawyers, and all the bad things that come with commercial software.
No more secondhand book shops, no more giving that book to a friend when you're done with it, no more libraries. You won't buy books anymore -- you'll buy licenses to read them. --
Slashdot Mirror
Let's not forget Citadel, which when finished will be not only a calendaring server, but e-mail as well -- a full-blown Exchange killer.
Y'know what the really key piece is, that no one seems to be able to do? The ability to look at one of your peers' free/busy times, and find free slots to schedule events. Exchange does this by publishing, at the user's option, a version of the user's calendar that has the actual appointment data removed - you only see the blocks that are marked "busy" (and the blocks that are marked "tentative".
Regrettably, the RFC's for calendaring don't contain any standard protocol for doing this. There is an RFC for the data format, and the RFC for sending invites, RSVP's, etc... but we need one more RFC for a calendar access protocol.
I, for one, am happy to see that Mozilla will be gaining a calendar client. It will allow those of us working on the Citadel project to work with the Mozilla calendar client on all platforms, without having to reverse-engineer Microsoft's protocol.
You shouldn't be using MSN or Hotmail anyway! When you go to MSN or HotMail, you are putting money directly into Bill's pocket. Advertising revenue etc. drives these sites' profits. DON'T GO THERE AT ALL. There is absolutely no excuse to be using these sites. There are many good Microsoft-free alternatives.
Well, if you think about it, Richard Stallman is always talking about freedom, and talking about talking about freedom... presumably this means that you have the freedom to telephone Richard Stallman in the middle of the night and ask him to give you free tech support for Emacs. I don't think he has any choice other than to provide it for you.
Guess I'll have to buy the White album again.
I call bullshit.
Here's a simple exercise: go to the nearest Windows machine, preferably one loaded with lots of apps of various vintages, and delete all but the newest VBRUN*.DLL, MFC*.DLL, etc. Then see how many of your apps work.
When Microsoft releases new widget sets, API's, etc., older applications do not automagically use them. Having, for example, MFC 2 and MFC 3 on your system isn't any different from having Qt 2 and Qt 3 on your system.
What Microsoft did get right, is the installation procedures: have multiple libraries sitting on the same machine if necessary, but don't bother the user about it -- it's not their problem.
I've got news for ya, folks: they're already doing this. There is an entire database marketing industry that does nothing but correlate data from different sources, build profiles on individual consumers, and then figure out your purchasing habits so they can predict your next move and supply you with the appropriate advertising.
Did you know that when you subscribe to a magazine, the stupid little cards that they stick in there are actually targeted specifically to you? It's true -- you and your neighbor could subscribe to the same magazine, but you'll get stuffed with different cards. The process is called selective binding and it's now a common practice in the database marketing universe.
Don't think for a minute that Big Brother isn't already tying in to this wealth of information. The addition of a unique ID number for each individual would merely be a formality at this point.
In a perfect world, it'd be nice to just go and do your own thing while ignoring the competition. This is especially true when you're playing in a free/open world and you don't have to worry about making money.
Unfortunately, that only works when everyone agrees to it.
The war against Microsoft is primarily a defensive one for Linux. Microsoft quite clearly is all about destroying everyone else. That includes Linux. Linux is not a Microsoft product and must therefore die. When you have a powerful multibillion monopoly out to end your life, you have to go to war. You can't ignore them or you'll wake up one day and find out that the hardware you run on and the network you connect to, once open territories for you to build your playground in, are now owned by the big bully and you have no choice but to shut down.
Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer deserve to die. Slowly and painfully. But that has nothing to do with Linux. The fact that they are putting enormous resources into making non-Microsoft technologies essentially unusable does have to do with Linux, though. It means that the Linux world must respond.
Those of you who remember the IBM antitrust years may recall one of the outcomes of that debacle: IBM was forced to unbundle its services from its products, and forced to document its interfaces. The birth of a reasonably fair aftermarket soon followed.
Let's home this happens to Microsoft too, and they have to completely remove all mentions of Passport/Hotmail from Windows, as well as IE and Media Player.
This spec could be terribly useful for anyone who wants to write a program to migrate a user's e-mail (or even their settings, etc.) to a new service.
Or better yet -- think about this: with this spec, an AOL module could be written for fetchmail. Suck down the mail from that old AOL account and deliver it via SMTP. Cool, eh?
One thing that I like about Jason is that he doesn't equivocate "BBS" with "the past" the way some other people (*cough*CmdrTaco*cough*) do. The BBS community is definitely alive and well; it's moved to the Internet, of course -- dialup is what's dead. And with modern BBS software giving users a choice of text or web interfaces, there's little chance that it's going to go away anytime soon. (Click this link to go to UNCENSORED! BBS, which I run on a Linux box in my basement with a DSL circuit.)
The role of BBS's is what has changed. The "make the sysop some money" boards all turned into ISP's in the mid-1990's. The "download information/drivers/etc." BBS's were properly replaced by web sites. But the online community BBS's are still here. The ones run by people who love to get a great group of people online to enjoy each other's company. The places where spirited, friendly discussion is the meat and bones of the medium. No, it's not exactly like it was a decade ago, but few things are. Some things aren't quite as charming, but some things are actually better. No more endless busy signals to get on your favorite BBS, since the Internet is by its nature multiuser (right now I'm counting 10 people logged into my BBS).
With the mainstream Internet becoming more and more the playground of the corporate elite, I'd expect small, hobbyist-operated sites like BBS's to become even more popular, as users get disgusted with having pre-packaged crap shoved at them through the big channels, and go around looking for something a little more "folksy."
Having the national Big Brother database running on Oracle would be a huge bee in Microsoft's bonnet. Perhaps they should go for it just on that basis.
Perception is reality. While those of us in the Free World see DIVX for what it really is -- a patent-unencumbered, open-systems codec -- we are the minority. Listen to folks in Windows circles talk about digital video. Since DIVX doesn't come from Microsoft or RealNetworks, they refer to it as a "warez codec". That's a loaded phrase, but it's bandied about quite often. It implies that its only use is for bypassing the DRM in corporate formats. That's definitely the way the intellectual property police want people to see it, too. It's up to us to educate the drooling masses.
Hmm... considering how difficult it would be to implement digital rights management on a general-purpose computing device such as a PC, one must wonder how they intend to implement it.
What if it's done in software? Or, what if that DRM hardware has to be driven by hooks in the operating system -- and if you use an operating system that doesn't have those hooks, the DRM hardware sits idle?
This would essentially turn the SSSCA into a law prohibiting the sale of computers with free operating systems, or with no operating systems at all --- a dream come true for Microsoft.
Hopefully, this little bit of history will replay itself.
.NET framework. They're putting the squeeze on, in an attempt to lock it all up once and for all. Hopefully the market will respond to .NET in the same way it responded to MCA: evil empire loyalists may adopt it, but everyone else will go running to some other, non-empire-controlled, open standard(s). J2EE, Linux, it's all there and it all works.
IBM took an open standard (the ISA bus) and tried to take it closed (the MCA bus) so they'd put an impenetrable lock on the market. The industry responded by saying "to hell with you, IBM; we're all going to EISA (and later, PCI)." Who's playing the close-it-up game now? Microsoft, of course. The Internet currnently runs on open standards, but Microsoft's 'MCA bus' is the
--
Attempting to measure how fast a computer can go by its CPU's clock speed is tantamount to measuring how fast a car can go by its engine's horsepower. There are many more factors at play here.
Let's start with the whole RISC vs. CISC thing. Everyone knows that RISC is more efficient; the only thing that has kept CISC alive this long is backwards compatibility with the Wintel juggernaut. You develop a lean, efficient instruction set, then you write compiler back ends that take advantage of it.
Also keep in mind that Sun's motherboard designs are true performers. The path between the CPU, memory, and bus are designed to move data around in ways that just aren't possible with Intel.
Did you know that SPARC is more or less an "open" CPU design? It was designed to be a multi-vendor instruction set, one that would be 'common' without having one vendor calling all the shots. Read www.sparc.org for more details.
This is a very intelligent move on the part of AOL. Keep in mind that Windows XP is about to ship, and it's going to include MSN Instant Messenger. AOL knows that people are going to adopt MSN Instant Messenger because of the path-of-least-resistance factor (witness the dominance of IE due to its bundling with Windows).
... rather than requiring "peering agreements" that only let the big boys play.
Why is this important? Because of the interoperability nature of instant messaging.
Anyone who does IM knows that IM users hang out in packs. You gather together your circle of buddies and you all use the same IM system, because the different systems don't talk to each other. Most groups use AIM, some use ICQ or Yahoo Pager, some use MSN. (I don't use any of them, because all of my buddies hang out on the same BBS and we use the instant messenger built into its software.)
AOL wants to avoid a situation in which an entire group of buddies has to move from AIM to MSN-IM because some or most of them are using MSN-IM. If there's interoperability between systems, AOL gets to keep some of the users.
This is a very smart move. AOL knows it can't keep all of the users. AOL also knows that you just don't get into a market share war with Microsoft when Microsoft is playing the bundling card.
I just hope that the interoperability standard is an open one (like e-mail is, with SMTP) and anyone can write a system that ties in
--
Despite the fact that some people here don't like AOL, this is good news... and here's why.
Amazon is a very high profile e-commerce site. People pay attention to what Amazon is doing... both technology people and business people. Amazon is perceived as a leader. And now that they're hooked up with AOL, the 'leader' will most certainly not become a Passport/Hailstorm site.
I've seen signs of an AOL/Netscape equivalent to that, actually. I'd be happy to see Amazon be part of that family. Not because I'd use it (I wouldn't), but because it would establish that Passport isn't the only game in town. Web sites could end up offering their users a choice of centralized authentication/payment services, much like you can walk into any store and pay with your choice of major credit cards today. Imagine: "We accept Microsoft Passport, AOL [whatever], GNU [whatever], or self pay..."
That's where I want to go today.
--
If you look at the cost breakdown of a multi-company service, you'll find that the carrier makes the bulk of the money. I have DSL at home, and I found that of the $50 per month that I pay, the carrier (Verizon) gets $35 of it, and my ISP (Acecape, who I highly recommend) gets the other $15.
AOLTW really has nothing to worry about here -- if anything, it means they get a good sized chunk of lucrative wholesale business. And they picked a good bunch of partners -- companies like Earthlink pride themselves on providing little more than raw connectivity: a market segment which has very little intersection with AOL's customer base. The typical AOL customer is unsophisticated and wants to have his/her hand held through the entire online experience.
Possibly most important of all is that this arrangement conveniently excludes Microsoft from the picture. MSN is the biggest threat to AOL right now, and since AOL is one of the few companies left that can hold its own against Microsoft, seeing them remain strong is vital to the industry, whether you use/like their services or not.
--
The LSB is not enough to offer a single target for ISV's.
It is missing two important things:
- A standard package format (RPM or DEB)
- A standard desktop framework (KDE or GNOME)
Until the coordinators of the LSB get "ballsy" enough to actually dictate these things (and rest assured it will anger 50 percent of the Linux community), we still do not have a single platform target for app installations.If you look at the ISV's who have ventured into Linux so far, the single target is (and I believe, until these issues are resolved, will remain) Red Hat.
When users install desktop apps, they expect the following things to happen:
- The installer needs to be easily startable (ok, we might be doing ok there)
- Icons and menu items are automatically added to the desktop
- Resources such as printers, fonts, etc. need to be connected to automatically
- If updated system libraries or components are required, find them and offer the opportunity to install them
The LSB is a good start, but it's not a comprehensive binary target. I believe that you can't make everyone happy -- some truly serious decisions such as package manager and desktop framework need to be made.--
Compaq bought DEC for one reason and one reason only: the service organization. DEC already had a worldwide organization of service engineers on staff, and a well-oiled machine to keep it all working. In order to tackle the enterprise market, Compaq needed that, and it was easier to buy DEC than to create it themselves.
What they really didn't want was DEC's technology. Those of you who were paying attention at the time might recall that Compaq initially told their Tru64 UNIX customers that they were going to force-migrate them all to Windows NT. This sounded good for a while, until the customers shouted back, "Screw you, we're going to Sun!" That made them back off.
Perhaps Compaq has now decided that it's time to finally let go of Alpha -- a technology that they feel is "baggage" when their bread and butter is Wintel. Itanium is clearly their desired destination. The only reason they give credit to Linux is because right now it's the only operating system that actually runs on Itanium.
It's a shame, I like Compaq's hardware -- I've always found it to be very well-built (albeit proprietary in places where it shouldn't be) -- but their dedication to the Wintel monoculture is quite unattractive.
--
The same thing happened with the product called "SuSE Email Server." It turned out to just be Postfix, Cyrus, and some other things pre-integrated and shipped in a nice-looking box bundled with a support agreement. Considering the magnitude of writing a database, I'd expect Red Hat's offering to be something similar. They didn't survive the Linux company shakeout and turn a profit by being stupid.
--
Fortunately, this is a sector of the industry in which competition still exists. The consumer will ultimately choose whichever product delivers the most value. This will probably come in the form of a box that does not depend on a subscription service and can store data locally. Ideally, the "guide" data will come from a place where it is already being paid for, such as the program guide included with DirecTV service. All they have to do is figure out some way to export the program guide from the DirecTV receiver.
On the other hand, this is a market that Microsoft is entering, so perhaps they'll simply tell consumers what to do (and buy, and view...) by eliminating competition.
--
This type of thing has been going on with magazine subscriptions for a very long time. I've done some work with database marketing companies and they scrutinize their customers (and potential customers) very closely using sophisticated software and big mainframes.
The result is a technique called "selective binding" which determines exactly which half-dozen annoying little cards fall out of your magazine when you open it. You and your neighbor might both have subscriptions to Basket Weaving Digest magazine, but if the database marketing company knows that you're a drinker and your neighbor is a smoker (for example), you'll receive different inserts with different advertising.
It's very lucrative for both advertising companies and the database marketing companies they work with. It's not surprising that television is moving this way as well.
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The publishing industry is probably drooling over the opportunity to publish EBooks using digital paper. And why not? With the data in digital format, it looks and quacks more like "software" than like a book. Enter the DMCA, "Intellectual Property" lawyers, and all the bad things that come with commercial software.
No more secondhand book shops, no more giving that book to a friend when you're done with it, no more libraries. You won't buy books anymore -- you'll buy licenses to read them.
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