The real commodities are standards. SQL is popular because there is an ANSI standard behind it. SELECT has a structure that all database backends understand. I can develop and INSERT statement that works with everything from sqlite to Oracle/PL.
Whoah! I see what you're getting at, but you picked one lousy example. Yeah, every database supports SELECT and INSERT, but that's about where SQL interoperability ends. Not even all INSERTs are created equal -- for example, if you wanted an auto-incrementing field, you'd need different code to do that on Oracle, MySQL, MS SQL, etc...
Standards are the commodities of technology. Once you have standards, you can build on them to create your "Next Big Thing" because they allow you to tie in everyone elses "Other Big Thing".
...and that was sort of the point of the original article. That Microsoft seems finally to be embracing the (in the author's opinion) inevitable, by backing open standards (for example, XML as a file format for Word).
I was being serious. I'm talking about business usage here. If you want to connect to an Exchange server you need to use the Mac OS version of Outlook, which sucks eggs compared to the Windows version.
You can't buy a "pound of software", strictly speaking.
What can be commoditized is time; specifically, the time spent to create software.
I think you're missing the point. A commodity market is one in which there may be multiple suppliers, but the product obtained from each is (in the eyes of the purchaser) undifferentiated. Not all software can be seen this way, but certain software categories can be.
I might say, "I am going to buy a J2EE application server." Hearing that, you need not assume I mean BEA Weblogic. There are a number of alternatives, and which one I pick doesn't really matter (at this level of decision-making, anyway).
I might say "I am going to buy a relational database." There is no reason to assume I mean IBM DB2 -- but I might mean that. Whatever.
I might say, "I am going to buy a disk defragmenter." There's no particular reason why that needs to be Norton Utilities. Etc.
If you have a bunch of products, and they're all perceived as being roughly identical and undifferentiated, then you have a commodity market. All that has to happen is for a free alternative to come along -- similarly undifferentiated, but equal in perceived value -- and the bottom drops out.
Most software isn't quite at that level yet, though. Superficially it may be, but as I drill down in the decision-making process it becomes more complicated. J2EE application servers differentiate themselves not by the base server container, but by the add-ons the vendor supplies to do business processing. Databases do various sophisticated things, such as clustering and replication, and each one does it in a different way, enough so that you could defend a decision favoring one over the other.
Web server software isn't a commodity market, either. Apache isn't successful just because it's free. It doesn't have a lot of competition because it would take a lot of work to produce a product of comparable value, and Apache would still be free. Those that do try to compete, again, have to differentiate themselves -- e.g. Zeus is all about speed.
This article seems to be arguing that the ways in which Microsoft seems to be trying to differentiate its products -- e.g. through the Word file format -- are based on activities so mundane (legible documents) that their markets cannot possibly be defended against commoditization. Maybe that's true, I dunno. To sound the old "impending paradigm shift" trumpet seems a little melodramatic to me, though.
As flipant as this the parent is, martial arts might be a real decent way to build some confidence in pysical activity, and get him/her interacting with people.
Unfortunately, he won't be able to actually practice the marital arts until he gets a girl interested in him...
Actually, you just raised a prime non-Linux example of what the parent was talking about. I work in the publishing industry, and despite the fact that most of the graphic designers in this industry use Macs, many, if not the majority, have still not switched fully over to Mac OS X because of a single application: QuarkXPress. It took Quark years after the release of Mac OS X to come out with a compatible version, and even though one is available now, that doesn't mean all the associated plug-ins, add-ons etc. have been ported yet (since they couldn't start until Quark got off its ass).
My main desktop machine at home is a Mac, and I haven't so much as fired up Classic in months, if not over a year. Every page layout designer I know sure does, though. Even though most of them agree that Mac OS X is "better" in every way (at least on current hardware), they're going to keep using the crappy old OS too, because it's the only way they're going to have access to the applications they need to get their work done.
P.S. Macs don't run Visio; they don't run Access; they have Entourage instead of a proper, modern Outlook; and if you're into such things, they can barely run more games than Linux can.
In San Francisco, for example, where Darl claimed he had armed bodyguards inside the Moscone Center. Were they properly licensed in the City of SF?
Seems to me it would be in Darl's interests to make sure they were, since it would avoid a lot of headaches. It's not like licensed bodyguards are that hard to find (assuming you've got the money to pay for them). Many of them are probably going to be active duty peace officers.
McBride has done battle before. He compares his fight with Linux supporters to the time when his family caught thieves stealing cattle from their ranch in Utah.
Really? I'd more compare it to the time he sued his own employers over his personal compensation package.
Really, if frivilous lawsuits caused people to fear for their lives, something is wrong witht his world.
OK, it's fun to knock Darl, but let's face it: We live in the kind of world where, if a woman dumps a guy she's not into anymore and he takes it kinda hard, she can find herself in fear of her life. We live in the kind of world where, if some kids decide they're sick of being unpopular at school, a whole bunch of people can end up in fear of their lives. We live in the kind of world where, if one driver cuts off another on a Los Angeles freeway, that person can find himself in fear of his life. Hate to rob you of your innocence, but it's a lousy world in a lot of ways.
I think the chances that Darl McBride has received death threats, both at his place of business and his residence, are so close to 100 percent as makes no difference. Some people can laugh that stuff off. Others choose to take it seriously. Who can argue with either approach?
how cool it would be if everyone had a Wireless Access Point on their rooftop, and formed a p2p wireless mini-internet with no bandwidth restrictions and free for all (minus the cost of the hardware).
Right now (as another poster mentioned), it's hard to scale this type of network effectively. But they're already working on ways to make it happen in San Francisco. The cost of the rooftop APs is a little out of reach for any but the most diehard geeks (or free wireless advocates), but hopefully the research will yield some new insights.
Red face, palpitations, slight paranoia and bizarrely, extreme short-sightedness (I normally have 20-20 vision). Wore off after 3-4 hours but it was scary as hell.
Hell, yes. You guys can brag all you want about the amount of coffee you drink -- and I myself used to down mugs so black the liquid would stain your finger the color of chocolate -- but until you've overdosed on caffeine you don't know what you're talking about when you say "caffeine buzz."
An ex-girlfriend of mine once gave me a couple No-Doz type caffeine pills, because I needed to stay up all night to get some work done. I downed both, not realizing she'd meant me to take one at a time -- or, in her case, a half of one at a time. She said nothing, though gave me a funny look. I, still under the delusion that these things really didn't affect me all that much, proceeded to go home, make myself a pot of black coffee, and down it.
Big mistake.
By four in the morning, I was tweaking like the worst speed come-down you can imagine. My head was spinning. I couldn't see straight. My pulse was racing. Hot flashes. Cold sweats. My hands were shaking like a newborn's. I was shaking, scratching, and wiping at my face like a junkie. And worst of all: the nausea. Extreme nausea, coupled with the inability to vomit (I stuck my finger down my throat repeatedly to make it stop -- nothing doing), that lasted for the next fourteen hours, give or take. As soon as the nausea went away for a time, I'd do something like... oh, I dunno... drink a glass of water... and here it all came again.
Add to this the fact that I had to fly to an all-day business meeting at the home office of a Fortune 500 company that morning, and you can imagine how bad my day sucked.
The whole experience made me gun-shy of caffeine for a long time; as soon as I started feeling those telltale effects that you normally don't even think about, I would freak out and have to start drinking water or something.
The moral: Coffee is good. I still luvs me a good Italian espresso. But remember -- it ain't a contest, fellas.
I've got a Fujitsu P5010 and I love it. Tiny screen, but less than 4 lbs. (even with the modular optical drive installed) and with a real-world battery life of about 5 hours if you don't crank the screen backlight and leave the wireless off. It's won all kinds of awards. A real winner, I think. I installed Mandrake 9.1 on mine fresh out of the box, no problems, except XFree86 doesn't like the widescreen aspect ratio of the LCD so you have to settle for 1024x768 with black stripes on the sides.
By comparison, Apple's 6.9-pound, 17-inch PowerBook packs a "58-watt-hour lithium-ion battery (with integrated charge indicator LEDs) providing up to 4.5 hours of battery life."
So basically, this is a notebook that's too heavy to carry and has too short a battery life to use when not plugged in. I am... baffled.
And a workplace system that comes with a DVD burner? Terrific. I know IT departments that don't even allow CD-RW drives for most of the workforce. I predict a new software market: "virus" scanning software that will alert admins whenever a copy of DVD2One is installed...
Tools like this, and GarageBand [apple.com] (yes; only for OS X) enable a musician to flesh out ideas and create good sounding demos to share with friends. It also let's "non-traditional musicians" to play with loops, cutting & pasting of sound files, and generally mucking around with sound to have fun. It shouldn't be taken lightly - it's akin to desktop and web publishing capabilities that began to explode as the tools got better and easier to use.
Ah, yes... and as we all recall, the advent of desktop publishing was an unprecedented boon to the -- um -- photocopied newsletter industry.
You know what sucks? I bought bootleg DVD-9 laserdisc rips of the whole Star Wars trilogy while I was in Malaysia a while back... but I couldn't find the original versions there, either! I think the Asian bootleggers must have succumbed to "newer is better" syndrome. If I remember right, you could get a DVD-5 version of the original cuts, but not a (less compressed) DVD-9.
During the Cultural Revolution, Chinese characters were simplified so that they would be easier to learn and take less time to write. Because Hong Kong was still a British colony at that time, the writing system in Hong Kong remained intact, as it did in Taiwan because the Nationalists did not adopt the system from the Communists. So not only do Hong Kong children have to learn the traditional characters, they also have to learn the written language with no phonetic guide. Moreover, the written language does not correspond to their spoken Cantonese. And most of them are also learning English at the same time.
Recently, Cantonese speakers in Hong Kong have done something that no other Chinese dialect speaker has done. They have chosen to write out their spoken Cantonese, which is like writing in Ebonics but without the stigmatization because Cantonese is the dominant language in Hong Kong. In the process, many words that do not exist in Bai-hua were created specifically for written Cantonese. And many of the words in Bai-hua are used differently in this written language. Written Cantonese is very colloquial, full of slang and idiomatic speech. In short, it is utterly incomprehensible to Mandarin speakers, and speakers of other Chinese dialects, even though it is written with Chinese characters.
I leave it to somebody else to say what usage is actually accepted in Hong Kong schools, businesses, etc.
Cantonese is the "second" official language of Hong Kong after Putongwua (Mandarin) and English is an increasingly distant third."
You'll have to cite a source for that. A lot of people seem to disagree with you, including Hong Kong's Commerce, Industry, and Technology Bureau (a Web site sponsored by which is cited above).
As I understand it, about 38 percent of people in Hong Kong speak English, and the state language policy is currently trilingual but biliterate -- meaning Cantonese, English, and Mandarin are all taught as spoken languages, but only Cantonese and English literacy is taught.
Literacy is, of course, the germane topic when it comes to computer use.
To this topic, I wrote an article about rights expression languages a while back. Of particular interest might be the sidebar at the end, "Rights: Patent Pending."
Of course you guys are trying to be funny, but it may be significant to note that both Hong Kong and Malaysia are countries where a lot of computing is liable to be done either in English or, at the very least, in a Roman character set.
English is the second official language of Hong Kong.
The official language of Malaysia is Bahasu Malaysia -- not "Chinese" -- and in written form it generally uses Roman characters.
I'd be interested to see what these desktops look like, but I'm betting Asian language support probably wasn't one of Novell's big motivating factors.
Soon a new microwave oven will require Windows and an Internet connection. ARGH!
Not so! The manufacturer of my new microwave oven makes firmware upgrades available for download on their Web site. You grab the firmware and burn it to a standard ISO filesystem. Then you put the CD-R into the microwave and zap it for exactly three minutes. You can tell the upgrade is taking place because of the flashing lights. And then, voila! Your microwave is upgraded with new features. The latest patch for my model upgraded it with an unusual new odor, which I'm not sure I'm totally into, but I guess you can't halt the march of progress.
Assuming this was a serious question, the generally-understood distinction is that a graphic novel should be a self-contained story, with a beginning, middle, and end. "Comic book" generally means the pamphlets you buy at the supermarket.
You could also compare a graphic novel to a movie, while comic books in general more resemble episodic television. Even when several issues of Spider-Man add up to one big story arc, the result is closer to a single season of a TV show like Babylon 5 than it is to a feature film.
Of course, this definition has been confused by a number of things:
A lot of graphic novels have been serialized in comic book form.
A lot of graphic novels -- even respected ones like "The Dark Knight Returns" and "Watchmen" -- use superhero characters from comic books.
Will Eisner's "A Contract With God," often argued as being the first graphic novel, is in fact a group of short stories.
In the 1980s, Marvel published a lot of superhero stories that were big and glossy, but not much different from regular comic books, and called them "graphic novels."
What about that dumb-looking CG dog that appears by default when you go to search for a file in Windows XP Pro? What kind of a "pro" would consider that a useful feature?
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I was being serious. I'm talking about business usage here. If you want to connect to an Exchange server you need to use the Mac OS version of Outlook, which sucks eggs compared to the Windows version.
- I might say, "I am going to buy a J2EE application server." Hearing that, you need not assume I mean BEA Weblogic. There are a number of alternatives, and which one I pick doesn't really matter (at this level of decision-making, anyway).
- I might say "I am going to buy a relational database." There is no reason to assume I mean IBM DB2 -- but I might mean that. Whatever.
- I might say, "I am going to buy a disk defragmenter." There's no particular reason why that needs to be Norton Utilities. Etc.
If you have a bunch of products, and they're all perceived as being roughly identical and undifferentiated, then you have a commodity market. All that has to happen is for a free alternative to come along -- similarly undifferentiated, but equal in perceived value -- and the bottom drops out.Most software isn't quite at that level yet, though. Superficially it may be, but as I drill down in the decision-making process it becomes more complicated. J2EE application servers differentiate themselves not by the base server container, but by the add-ons the vendor supplies to do business processing. Databases do various sophisticated things, such as clustering and replication, and each one does it in a different way, enough so that you could defend a decision favoring one over the other.
Web server software isn't a commodity market, either. Apache isn't successful just because it's free. It doesn't have a lot of competition because it would take a lot of work to produce a product of comparable value, and Apache would still be free. Those that do try to compete, again, have to differentiate themselves -- e.g. Zeus is all about speed.
This article seems to be arguing that the ways in which Microsoft seems to be trying to differentiate its products -- e.g. through the Word file format -- are based on activities so mundane (legible documents) that their markets cannot possibly be defended against commoditization. Maybe that's true, I dunno. To sound the old "impending paradigm shift" trumpet seems a little melodramatic to me, though.
Oops! Damn dyslexia...
My main desktop machine at home is a Mac, and I haven't so much as fired up Classic in months, if not over a year. Every page layout designer I know sure does, though. Even though most of them agree that Mac OS X is "better" in every way (at least on current hardware), they're going to keep using the crappy old OS too, because it's the only way they're going to have access to the applications they need to get their work done.
P.S. Macs don't run Visio; they don't run Access; they have Entourage instead of a proper, modern Outlook; and if you're into such things, they can barely run more games than Linux can.
Pretty hard to find a notebook with no OS on it. And in many cases, Linux supports only a subset of the functionality of Windows on notebook hardware.
I think the chances that Darl McBride has received death threats, both at his place of business and his residence, are so close to 100 percent as makes no difference. Some people can laugh that stuff off. Others choose to take it seriously. Who can argue with either approach?
An ex-girlfriend of mine once gave me a couple No-Doz type caffeine pills, because I needed to stay up all night to get some work done. I downed both, not realizing she'd meant me to take one at a time -- or, in her case, a half of one at a time. She said nothing, though gave me a funny look. I, still under the delusion that these things really didn't affect me all that much, proceeded to go home, make myself a pot of black coffee, and down it.
Big mistake.
By four in the morning, I was tweaking like the worst speed come-down you can imagine. My head was spinning. I couldn't see straight. My pulse was racing. Hot flashes. Cold sweats. My hands were shaking like a newborn's. I was shaking, scratching, and wiping at my face like a junkie. And worst of all: the nausea. Extreme nausea, coupled with the inability to vomit (I stuck my finger down my throat repeatedly to make it stop -- nothing doing), that lasted for the next fourteen hours, give or take. As soon as the nausea went away for a time, I'd do something like ... oh, I dunno ... drink a glass of water ... and here it all came again.
Add to this the fact that I had to fly to an all-day business meeting at the home office of a Fortune 500 company that morning, and you can imagine how bad my day sucked.
The whole experience made me gun-shy of caffeine for a long time; as soon as I started feeling those telltale effects that you normally don't even think about, I would freak out and have to start drinking water or something.
The moral: Coffee is good. I still luvs me a good Italian espresso. But remember -- it ain't a contest, fellas.
My landlord's a lawyer.
I've got a Fujitsu P5010 and I love it. Tiny screen, but less than 4 lbs. (even with the modular optical drive installed) and with a real-world battery life of about 5 hours if you don't crank the screen backlight and leave the wireless off. It's won all kinds of awards. A real winner, I think. I installed Mandrake 9.1 on mine fresh out of the box, no problems, except XFree86 doesn't like the widescreen aspect ratio of the LCD so you have to settle for 1024x768 with black stripes on the sides.
Whaa-a-aa-aaa?
... baffled.
By comparison, Apple's 6.9-pound, 17-inch PowerBook packs a "58-watt-hour lithium-ion battery (with integrated charge indicator LEDs) providing up to 4.5 hours of battery life."
So basically, this is a notebook that's too heavy to carry and has too short a battery life to use when not plugged in. I am
And a workplace system that comes with a DVD burner? Terrific. I know IT departments that don't even allow CD-RW drives for most of the workforce. I predict a new software market: "virus" scanning software that will alert admins whenever a copy of DVD2One is installed...
You know what sucks? I bought bootleg DVD-9 laserdisc rips of the whole Star Wars trilogy while I was in Malaysia a while back ... but I couldn't find the original versions there, either! I think the Asian bootleggers must have succumbed to "newer is better" syndrome. If I remember right, you could get a DVD-5 version of the original cuts, but not a (less compressed) DVD-9.
From the article:
I leave it to somebody else to say what usage is actually accepted in Hong Kong schools, businesses, etc.As I understand it, about 38 percent of people in Hong Kong speak English, and the state language policy is currently trilingual but biliterate -- meaning Cantonese, English, and Mandarin are all taught as spoken languages, but only Cantonese and English literacy is taught.
Literacy is, of course, the germane topic when it comes to computer use.
To this topic, I wrote an article about rights expression languages a while back. Of particular interest might be the sidebar at the end, "Rights: Patent Pending."
Hey man, don't blame me -- I have mod points right now and I posted instead.
But that's just the thing; you plays your cards, you takes your chances. Being funny is hard. Wield not the Rod of Funny in vain!
(And you're still at +5 as of now, so quitcher whinin'.)
Of course you guys are trying to be funny, but it may be significant to note that both Hong Kong and Malaysia are countries where a lot of computing is liable to be done either in English or, at the very least, in a Roman character set.
English is the second official language of Hong Kong.
The official language of Malaysia is Bahasu Malaysia -- not "Chinese" -- and in written form it generally uses Roman characters.
I'd be interested to see what these desktops look like, but I'm betting Asian language support probably wasn't one of Novell's big motivating factors.
You could also compare a graphic novel to a movie, while comic books in general more resemble episodic television. Even when several issues of Spider-Man add up to one big story arc, the result is closer to a single season of a TV show like Babylon 5 than it is to a feature film.
Of course, this definition has been confused by a number of things:
But you get the idea.
What about that dumb-looking CG dog that appears by default when you go to search for a file in Windows XP Pro? What kind of a "pro" would consider that a useful feature?