Since I can't find it, perhaps somebody from this specific field can answer these questions:
What part of our total electricity production is going into creating light?
What part of creating light is done with conventional light bulbs?
Are the energy savings of this new type of lamp higher than with current 'green' light-bulbs?
What would the cost offset be compared to conventional lighting? The only thing mentioned is it will be cheap due to the fact that silicon technology production is cheap. How cheap is that compared to conventional light-bulb production? Can't be cheaper.
Does it cost more in waste-processing?
Only if we answer all of these we'll know if this will be cheaper for the total product-life-cycle.
They see nothing wrong with altruistically giving away code (which is what the BSD license and its ilk are about) but licenses like the GPL that attempt to devalue the cost of software are anathema to such people. The GPL drives the cost of software to 0 or at worst the cost of distribution media (just take a look at Cheapbytes [cheapbytes.com] for a living example of this). This means that any entity that produces GPL software most augment their income in some way be it through moonlighting, consulting, support, selling hardware, etc. This is not a mere side-effect but was an explicit goal of the GPL [...]
/me snaps jaws together.
Being altruistic means giving away something without expecting anything in return. In that sense the GPL isn't altruistic.
Now consider why people generally want to be altruistic and especially to whom they want to be altruistic to.
The reason is either out of belief one becomes a better person (true altruism) or because others will perceive one as a better person. For this the BSD license will do, except that it's not like a designers badge on a luxury car, no-one will see on the outside what you as a programmer acomplished when it's integrated into a propriety piece of software. With the GPL you have at least the certainty that your peers will be able to give you mental credit for your work.
On the second point, most people like to be altruistic for the benefit of those in society that aren't so well off to begin with. There is little reward in being altruistic to a [bm]illionaire. You want people to benefit from what you did, and although people using propriety software may benefit from what you made through propriety software the satisfaction you will get is usually perceived as being a lot less than when the poor benefit off of it for nothing.
Now for a seperate train of thought: most people writing GPLed software are not being altruistic. They do want something in return for their hard work. In this case it isn't money, not even recognition, they want the work of others to build on their own so they can in turn profit off of that work. I contribute my work to the community, let the community damn well contribute back. The BSD license doesn't provide for this kind of motive.
All in all I think it a faux pas on your part to defend Microsoft's will to profit off of others. This licensing scheme isn't protecting any god- or lawgiven rights, it's meant to deprive others of their rights to do their own thing. In that sense it feels like rape to me. It disallows any other motive than money to write software. How can this be good in any way?
Now please go crawl back under the rock you came from because your mind-set is not so much a capitalist one as you a free-loading one. God knows we have free-loaders enough without you.
-----
Re:And how are they supposed to measure this?
on
More on MPEG4
·
· Score: 1
Here in California, where gas prices are around $1.25 per gallon, over 1/2 of that cost is in the form of various taxes and fees.
I understand that ratio is considerably higher still in Europe.
That's an understatement to frame and put on a wall. Gas costs (here in the Netherlands, admittedly one of the most expensive countries for gas even in Europe) slightly over 1 euro per litre. Given that a litre is 0.2642 Gallon, that Gas costs 1.1 Euro per litre and that 1 dollar costs 0.8788 Euro that brings the gas price to 4.7377 dollars per Gallon. That is almost 4 times higher than in California which I understand is relatively expensive in the USA. All of that is taxes for environment and such.
Oh, shut up. That's how a transparent proxy works. I suppose the Linux facilities for transparent proxing -- available for years now -- are also evil?
No they're not. But as with any tool, be it a
hammer, a gun or a web-proxy, the danger does not
explicitly lie in the tool but in the use that's
made of it. Even if this is some sort of troll you
better put your clue-by-four somewhere sensible
because it's the fact that you can't influence it
that's bothering me and others. If this story pans
out to not be true at all that doesn't mean that
other backbones don't use it without means of
circumventing it and it's still bad. Very bad.
Evolutionists were afraid that soon every child would have to be delivered through a cesaerian because men would evolve to grow bigger heads. Heads too big to fit through the female pelvis are the main concern.
My point being: artificial womb==no pelvis==we geeks will now be able to evolve to the next stage!
On a more serious and realistic note: I made the following suggestion to the maintainer of the Debian security FAQ.
Do logging to the serial port in syslog format as if is a serial connection. Do this on all your servers. Hang a multiplexer in the middle (perhaps you have an old one from the modem pool still lying around gathering dust).
On the multiplexer you hang a seperate box and make it's serial TTy's go to a syslog daemon. Can be a Pentium class computer. Give it ample RAM (some 32MB EDO-simms out of those boxes from 5 years back. You _did_ gut them for parts did you?), 1 HD for the OS and 1 for the logs, about 1 GB each should be more than enough. NO NETWORK. NONE. WHATSOEVER.
Depending on your needs you either hang a simple CD-burner in it, a simple CD-burner with a Lego robot to change your cd's (*cough*) or a real SCSI cd-changer of of a cheap scsi-card.
You log to the HD of that log-box. You run a script that does nothing but check the size of the log and perhaps how fast it is currently growing. When it approaches 600 or 700 MB you dump the log to CD-ROM. Depending on your needs and how fast the log fills you then make it page you when it runs out of CD's (changer) or out of space.
Takes less storage.
(If you really want the complete security of paper logs, at least get an old line-printer from somewhere. If your machine freaks out it will at least be able to keep up untill its paper runs out. No such luck with a simple matrix printer).
That's what you get for not using your 'own' products there...:D
Anyway, as you said, we'll just have to wait and see but the fact that they missed their (admittedly moving) target by so much more than the last releases makes one think. In the mean time it dawned upon me that the holidays were in between. Maybe they are the cause.
That depends on when she's getting the divorce and how the stock/options are looking by then. I think she should let him have the options and take everything else herself (including common friends:D).
Not meant as a flame (but as is often the case, when somebody says it's not, it will be perceived as one nonetheless). This is about as informative as tea-leaves.
If you look at the roadmap you'll see that 0.9.8 came out almost 2 weeks after the planned 'optimal release date'. That in itself is unsignificant, but this was the largest deviation from a planned optimal release dat since Mozilla changed it's numbering scheme. Expect the delays to grow as final approaches so as to not get your hopes up ok?
I don't give a rats ass what the large corporations use Linux for. Be it as a pawn or as toilet paper. Every time it gets mentioned by big players it wins credibility and with credibility comes deployment, with deployment comes marketshare and then power.
Let Larry say what he likes, he himself is a pawn in the big game that will result in a fair operating systems market where Linux is a large player. Thank you Larry, if only for that.
It seems someone has already done this and put the building plan in some Dutch magazine. I'm looking it up as I write this but haven't found it yet. I'll keep looking though. A 'friend of a friend' managed to get his illegal CD-R copyshop running without him at incredible output so at least we know it works...:D
If she's playing games she better start to learn how to play because this is all the more incentive for Compaq to get out of this mess altogether and let the groom standing before the altar. Can you imagine what visions of market share the managers at Compaq must have right now? HP gone... All your bussiness are belong to us...
Fiorina better think up something else fast because she's not helping the merger. Not helping at all.
(asside: I think the two should never get married for a whole lot of reasons already given by enough other people.)
I can think of one or two things you missed yes...
a) CowboyNeal!
b) Every slashdotter is a windows user at heart if only (s)he could afford it...
Now for the short short version of the other arguments against your post: you've succeeded nicely at painting apples orange so you could compare them.
For instance, in point 2 and 3 you're comparing life-long (mis)behaviour on MS' part with incidents in the Linux community and even then your examples are wrong too.
In point 4 you tell us they've been testing the patch. They _could_ have told the world about the work-around for this when they found the flaw:
DON'T OPEN ANY FILETYPE. ALWAYS SELECT SAVE
For point 5: this _is_ a fundamental design flaw. The fact that it doesn't have the severe implications some suggest doesn't diminish that fact by one bit.
For point 6 I can only say: be glad he didn't tie it to Cowboy Neal. Be _very_ glad.
Even if most people agree, most of those people _still_ don't try to persuade their representatives to take different stance. Mostly because of the "Oh, others will do it. Everyone here is against it, so others will do the work for me."
You and I, we have to tell our politicians this is the wrong way. Otherwise this will lead to a culture that will ultimately give rise to that new totalitarian state I'm talking about. Mind you, there _were_ enlightened spirits in Nazi-Germany back then, they just couldn't speak out loud enough to be heared in time. Now that we have our information age this should not need happen again, we can reach enough people in a concerted effort. I hope I can convince you and others to not whisk me asside as superfluous, but listen to me and help fight this fight.
The fears of the informed seem to have come true. What remains is this question: will the informed be able to get the uninformed interested enough to rise up against this new police state? This is either the start of the real Third Reich (before you hit that flame-bait button, read on) coming to you in 25 years from now, or the last straw to make the people regain civil liberties from Corporatism and mis-guided politicians.
We will need to ring the bell louder, make more people aware. We have the obligation to do so because we know. If you let this go unchallenged, don't come complaining in 25 years time that your children have no rights, no liberties.
Should this sound absurd to you, read into some European history for the years 1900-1939, to read the reasons for WW I, WW II and what happend in the "interbellum". You may very well not like what you find. For WW I a single event was enough to set it off. For WW II the foundation was laid by a repressive reaction 'supported' by the 'people'. 2001-9-11 may very well be the one event, the repression of civil liberties in reaction to it may very well bring it on for real.
Again The waves are eating at the lime-stone, slowly but surely. In the end the rock _will_ fall.
If you, like me, have your office not 25 metres from a high-way you can now wreak real havoc. Better yet, you now can put _your_ crapy, old, unshielded monitor to good use! It'll be pretty damn hard to track such a weak signal down with a lot of offices around and a bouncing, on/off signal.
Make sure you mangle your voice after recording your fake messages will you? No fun getting caught, besides you want to make yourself sound like a news-anchor.
(For the humor impaired: don't try this at home. Traffic kills more people than drugs.)
I was just about to create YASCWF (Yet another screensaver with fractals). Now I guess I'll just use this map continually updating in the background...
(Yes I have a T1, no I _don't_ care about it wasting my bandwith.)
Karma? What's that again?
Re:Globalization - We didn't vote for it.
on
Globalization
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
In Europe, the Middle East, Africa, South America, Japan, Russia etc our values are different. We put family and religion first. We do not care about your profit motive.
Please speak for yourself? For some reason religiousnous is a lot stronger in the USA than it is in many European countries and you better be glad it is because that way lies fundamentalism. I assume that since you read the text that you know what fundamentalism begets...
Don't forget that a mere few hundred years ago Europe had it's inquisition and a few other religously founded nasties. What we are seeing now is the rest of the world catching up in a hurry and not very willingly.
Globalisation in my book means that more people get to talk to more people. Everything else follows from that: trade, wealth, crime, etc. The thing is that above a certain amount of links to other people per person a society changes. That change is irreversible bar some global catastrofy.
I can only hope we'll shake off religion as another bond to our primitive ancestory and move on. The only thing that wars have been ever fought over were economics and religion. We found out the hard way that it doesn't make economical sense for a democracy to wage war. We found out that it doesn't make sense to wage war over religion as well but for some reason the religion gets in the way with that argument. So Globalisation will work out but as said it will have its ups and downs. In the end I trust it will bring what it promisses: 'wealth' to go round for _everyone_.
I'm not so much afraid of fundamentalism in its current form, in my view the _real_ threat to such a brilliant future is _corporatism_. That fight has it's own problems, mainly in visibility of the problem. But I digress.
Karma? What's that again?
Re:Reminder to self: must let PHB read this
on
Microsoft's Future
·
· Score: 1
At the risk of feeding a Troll: who has essentially been running the company then these last years? His stepping down was merely ceremonial, not factual.
Re:2.2.x where x=19 also vulnerable
on
Linux Kernel Bugs
·
· Score: 1
I was away for some time hence the slow reaction. It _read_ x=19 where it should've read x=19. Notice the added ''. So all versions up to and including.19 are affected unfortunatly.
These examples are a nice laugh but also _the_ example of abuse of monopoly power. To use the profit of one part of a bussiness to get into a new market while losing gross amounts of money is just as much 'using monopoly power' as is tying a product . Microsoft is using revenues to force its way into new markets and unless shareholders go revolting nothing will be done about it. Lets face it unless the downturn of the economy will stop them for financial reasons this is just another mark on their guitar.
And some people wonder why other people actually despise Microsoft...
Karma? What's that again?
Reminder to self: must let PHB read this
on
Microsoft's Future
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
This is actually true journalism. Reporting the facts as they see them without taking a position per se. As such it paints a grim but realistic picture of the future of computing.
It shows two roads ahead instead of just the one BG sees through his (obviously worn out) glasses.
One road is that where Microsoft gets new leadership because BG steps down in time. Down that road lies an IBM-like future for Microsoft with plenty of opportunities and a more 'normal' growth pattern for the company.
The other road is the one where BG isn't willing or capable of stepping down and Microsoft will go on with it's current practices. The writer doesn't really predict what might happen but has a swing at it by saying (between the lines) that revenue-growth may not be able to keep up it's march forward.
The bottom line is that if your PHB isn't _real_ dimwitted _and_ has an idea of economics (I know it might be too much to ask but still) he may get this. The fact that it reads "The Economist" on top should at least help a bit.
To use the paltry 1.5% of shipments of Linux for desktop environments to disqualify Linux as a contender for the desktop shows how little the writer knows about Linux. And the writer worked for Red Hat? Please, somebody hit her with a clue-bat. The amount of shipments tells nothing about the installed base and for desktops you can rest assured that the number of shipments should be multiplied by a _much_ larger amount than with server-shipments exactly _because_ of the reduced licensing cost it can bring for workstations! Don't bother to read the piece, it's useless and shouldn't even have been posted here especially since it's a day old.
Slashdot Mirror
Since I can't find it, perhaps somebody from this specific field can answer these questions:
What part of our total electricity production is going into creating light?
What part of creating light is done with conventional light bulbs?
Are the energy savings of this new type of lamp higher than with current 'green' light-bulbs?
What would the cost offset be compared to conventional lighting? The only thing mentioned is it will be cheap due to the fact that silicon technology production is cheap. How cheap is that compared to conventional light-bulb production? Can't be cheaper.
Does it cost more in waste-processing?
Only if we answer all of these we'll know if this will be cheaper for the total product-life-cycle.
---
/me snaps jaws together.
Being altruistic means giving away something without expecting anything in return. In that sense the GPL isn't altruistic.
Now consider why people generally want to be altruistic and especially to whom they want to be altruistic to.
The reason is either out of belief one becomes a better person (true altruism) or because others will perceive one as a better person. For this the BSD license will do, except that it's not like a designers badge on a luxury car, no-one will see on the outside what you as a programmer acomplished when it's integrated into a propriety piece of software. With the GPL you have at least the certainty that your peers will be able to give you mental credit for your work.
On the second point, most people like to be altruistic for the benefit of those in society that aren't so well off to begin with. There is little reward in being altruistic to a [bm]illionaire. You want people to benefit from what you did, and although people using propriety software may benefit from what you made through propriety software the satisfaction you will get is usually perceived as being a lot less than when the poor benefit off of it for nothing.
Now for a seperate train of thought: most people writing GPLed software are not being altruistic. They do want something in return for their hard work. In this case it isn't money, not even recognition, they want the work of others to build on their own so they can in turn profit off of that work. I contribute my work to the community, let the community damn well contribute back. The BSD license doesn't provide for this kind of motive.
All in all I think it a faux pas on your part to defend Microsoft's will to profit off of others. This licensing scheme isn't protecting any god- or lawgiven rights, it's meant to deprive others of their rights to do their own thing. In that sense it feels like rape to me. It disallows any other motive than money to write software. How can this be good in any way?
Now please go crawl back under the rock you came from because your mind-set is not so much a capitalist one as you a free-loading one. God knows we have free-loaders enough without you.
-----
That's an understatement to frame and put on a wall. Gas costs (here in the Netherlands, admittedly one of the most expensive countries for gas even in Europe) slightly over 1 euro per litre. Given that a litre is 0.2642 Gallon, that Gas costs 1.1 Euro per litre and that 1 dollar costs 0.8788 Euro that brings the gas price to 4.7377 dollars per Gallon. That is almost 4 times higher than in California which I understand is relatively expensive in the USA. All of that is taxes for environment and such.
Stop whining...
---
No they're not. But as with any tool, be it a
hammer, a gun or a web-proxy, the danger does not
explicitly lie in the tool but in the use that's
made of it. Even if this is some sort of troll you
better put your clue-by-four somewhere sensible
because it's the fact that you can't influence it
that's bothering me and others. If this story pans
out to not be true at all that doesn't mean that
other backbones don't use it without means of
circumventing it and it's still bad. Very bad.
_________________
One upside to this:
Evolutionists were afraid that soon every child would have to be delivered through a cesaerian because men would evolve to grow bigger heads. Heads too big to fit through the female pelvis are the main concern.
My point being: artificial womb==no pelvis==we geeks will now be able to evolve to the next stage!
On a more serious and realistic note: I made the following suggestion to the maintainer of the Debian security FAQ.
Do logging to the serial port in syslog format as if is a serial connection. Do this on all your servers. Hang a multiplexer in the middle (perhaps you have an old one from the modem pool still lying around gathering dust).
On the multiplexer you hang a seperate box and make it's serial TTy's go to a syslog daemon. Can be a Pentium class computer. Give it ample RAM (some 32MB EDO-simms out of those boxes from 5 years back. You _did_ gut them for parts did you?), 1 HD for the OS and 1 for the logs, about 1 GB each should be more than enough. NO NETWORK. NONE. WHATSOEVER.
Depending on your needs you either hang a simple CD-burner in it, a simple CD-burner with a Lego robot to change your cd's (*cough*) or a real SCSI cd-changer of of a cheap scsi-card.
You log to the HD of that log-box. You run a script that does nothing but check the size of the log and perhaps how fast it is currently growing. When it approaches 600 or 700 MB you dump the log to CD-ROM. Depending on your needs and how fast the log fills you then make it page you when it runs out of CD's (changer) or out of space.
Takes less storage.
(If you really want the complete security of paper logs, at least get an old line-printer from somewhere. If your machine freaks out it will at least be able to keep up untill its paper runs out. No such luck with a simple matrix printer).
That's what you get for not using your 'own' products there... :D
Anyway, as you said, we'll just have to wait and see but the fact that they missed their (admittedly moving) target by so much more than the last releases makes one think. In the mean time it dawned upon me that the holidays were in between. Maybe they are the cause.
That depends on when she's getting the divorce and how the stock/options are looking by then. I think she should let him have the options and take everything else herself (including common friends :D).
Not meant as a flame (but as is often the case, when somebody says it's not, it will be perceived as one nonetheless). This is about as informative as tea-leaves.
If you look at the roadmap you'll see that 0.9.8 came out almost 2 weeks after the planned 'optimal release date'. That in itself is unsignificant, but this was the largest deviation from a planned optimal release dat since Mozilla changed it's numbering scheme. Expect the delays to grow as final approaches so as to not get your hopes up ok?
I dare doubt his wife forgave him.
She may have felt better after seeing the extra batch of stock-options he got as a bonus.
/me looks at the ticker-tape
Hm. Guess not.
Warning: severe karmawhoring ahead!
I don't give a rats ass what the large corporations use Linux for. Be it as a pawn or as toilet paper. Every time it gets mentioned by big players it wins credibility and with credibility comes deployment, with deployment comes marketshare and then power.
Let Larry say what he likes, he himself is a pawn in the big game that will result in a fair operating systems market where Linux is a large player. Thank you Larry, if only for that.
It seems someone has already done this and put the building plan in some Dutch magazine. I'm looking it up as I write this but haven't found it yet. I'll keep looking though. A 'friend of a friend' managed to get his illegal CD-R copyshop running without him at incredible output so at least we know it works... :D
If she's playing games she better start to learn how to play because this is all the more incentive for Compaq to get out of this mess altogether and let the groom standing before the altar. Can you imagine what visions of market share the managers at Compaq must have right now? HP gone... All your bussiness are belong to us...
Fiorina better think up something else fast because she's not helping the merger. Not helping at all.
(asside: I think the two should never get married for a whole lot of reasons already given by enough other people.)
One upshot to this: you'll have more money to spend on empty cd's and bandwith because now you'll be downloading and burning all your music.
--
I can think of one or two things you missed yes...
a) CowboyNeal!
b) Every slashdotter is a windows user at heart if only (s)he could afford it...
Now for the short short version of the other arguments against your post: you've succeeded nicely at painting apples orange so you could compare them.
For instance, in point 2 and 3 you're comparing life-long (mis)behaviour on MS' part with incidents in the Linux community and even then your examples are wrong too.
In point 4 you tell us they've been testing the patch. They _could_ have told the world about the work-around for this when they found the flaw:
DON'T OPEN ANY FILETYPE. ALWAYS SELECT SAVE
For point 5: this _is_ a fundamental design flaw. The fact that it doesn't have the severe implications some suggest doesn't diminish that fact by one bit.
For point 6 I can only say: be glad he didn't tie it to Cowboy Neal. Be _very_ glad.
.
Even if most people agree, most of those people _still_ don't try to persuade their representatives to take different stance. Mostly because of the "Oh, others will do it. Everyone here is against it, so others will do the work for me."
You and I, we have to tell our politicians this is the wrong way. Otherwise this will lead to a culture that will ultimately give rise to that new totalitarian state I'm talking about. Mind you, there _were_ enlightened spirits in Nazi-Germany back then, they just couldn't speak out loud enough to be heared in time. Now that we have our information age this should not need happen again, we can reach enough people in a concerted effort. I hope I can convince you and others to not whisk me asside as superfluous, but listen to me and help fight this fight.
The fears of the informed seem to have come true. What remains is this question: will the informed be able to get the uninformed interested enough to rise up against this new police state? This is either the start of the real Third Reich (before you hit that flame-bait button, read on) coming to you in 25 years from now, or the last straw to make the people regain civil liberties from Corporatism and mis-guided politicians.
We will need to ring the bell louder, make more people aware. We have the obligation to do so because we know. If you let this go unchallenged, don't come complaining in 25 years time that your children have no rights, no liberties.
Should this sound absurd to you, read into some European history for the years 1900-1939, to read the reasons for WW I, WW II and what happend in the "interbellum". You may very well not like what you find. For WW I a single event was enough to set it off. For WW II the foundation was laid by a repressive reaction 'supported' by the 'people'. 2001-9-11 may very well be the one event, the repression of civil liberties in reaction to it may very well bring it on for real.
Again The waves are eating at the lime-stone, slowly but surely. In the end the rock _will_ fall.
If you, like me, have your office not 25 metres from a high-way you can now wreak real havoc. Better yet, you now can put _your_ crapy, old, unshielded monitor to good use! It'll be pretty damn hard to track such a weak signal down with a lot of offices around and a bouncing, on/off signal.
Make sure you mangle your voice after recording your fake messages will you? No fun getting caught, besides you want to make yourself sound like a news-anchor.
(For the humor impaired: don't try this at home. Traffic kills more people than drugs.)
I was just about to create YASCWF (Yet another screensaver with fractals). Now I guess I'll just use this map continually updating in the background...
(Yes I have a T1, no I _don't_ care about it wasting my bandwith.)
Karma? What's that again?
Please speak for yourself? For some reason religiousnous is a lot stronger in the USA than it is in many European countries and you better be glad it is because that way lies fundamentalism. I assume that since you read the text that you know what fundamentalism begets...
Don't forget that a mere few hundred years ago Europe had it's inquisition and a few other religously founded nasties. What we are seeing now is the rest of the world catching up in a hurry and not very willingly.
Globalisation in my book means that more people get to talk to more people. Everything else follows from that: trade, wealth, crime, etc. The thing is that above a certain amount of links to other people per person a society changes. That change is irreversible bar some global catastrofy.
I can only hope we'll shake off religion as another bond to our primitive ancestory and move on. The only thing that wars have been ever fought over were economics and religion. We found out the hard way that it doesn't make economical sense for a democracy to wage war. We found out that it doesn't make sense to wage war over religion as well but for some reason the religion gets in the way with that argument. So Globalisation will work out but as said it will have its ups and downs. In the end I trust it will bring what it promisses: 'wealth' to go round for _everyone_.
I'm not so much afraid of fundamentalism in its current form, in my view the _real_ threat to such a brilliant future is _corporatism_. That fight has it's own problems, mainly in visibility of the problem. But I digress.
Karma? What's that again?
At the risk of feeding a Troll: who has essentially been running the company then these last years? His stepping down was merely ceremonial, not factual.
I was away for some time hence the slow reaction. It _read_ x=19 where it should've read x=19. Notice the added ''. So all versions up to and including .19 are affected unfortunatly.
These examples are a nice laugh but also _the_ example of abuse of monopoly power. To use the profit of one part of a bussiness to get into a new market while losing gross amounts of money is just as much 'using monopoly power' as is tying a product . Microsoft is using revenues to force its way into new markets and unless shareholders go revolting nothing will be done about it. Lets face it unless the downturn of the economy will stop them for financial reasons this is just another mark on their guitar.
And some people wonder why other people actually despise Microsoft...
Karma? What's that again?
This is actually true journalism. Reporting the facts as they see them without taking a position per se. As such it paints a grim but realistic picture of the future of computing.
It shows two roads ahead instead of just the one BG sees through his (obviously worn out) glasses.
One road is that where Microsoft gets new leadership because BG steps down in time. Down that road lies an IBM-like future for Microsoft with plenty of opportunities and a more 'normal' growth pattern for the company.
The other road is the one where BG isn't willing or capable of stepping down and Microsoft will go on with it's current practices. The writer doesn't really predict what might happen but has a swing at it by saying (between the lines) that revenue-growth may not be able to keep up it's march forward.
The bottom line is that if your PHB isn't _real_ dimwitted _and_ has an idea of economics (I know it might be too much to ask but still) he may get this. The fact that it reads "The Economist" on top should at least help a bit.
Karma? What's that again?
To use the paltry 1.5% of shipments of Linux for desktop environments to disqualify Linux as a contender for the desktop shows how little the writer knows about Linux. And the writer worked for Red Hat? Please, somebody hit her with a clue-bat. The amount of shipments tells nothing about the installed base and for desktops you can rest assured that the number of shipments should be multiplied by a _much_ larger amount than with server-shipments exactly _because_ of the reduced licensing cost it can bring for workstations! Don't bother to read the piece, it's useless and shouldn't even have been posted here especially since it's a day old.
Karma? What's that again?