While it makes sense for Apple to buy these packages, it may not make sense to immediately assume the company will make them MacOS-only in either the long or short-term. There are a number of Apple technologies including AppleWorks (Formely ClarisWorks) and FileMaker Pro which continue to have Windows versions produced to this day. Rather, these purchases simply let Apple showcase the advantages of the MacOS X platform by *forcing* a port of these products to MacOS X and making sure that port takes the fullest advantage of the MacOS X toolsets.
Wow, Mozilla 1.0 was just released, with much pomp and circumstance (or if you read CNET, much weeping and gnashing of teeth) and already we are seeing a 1.1 milestone being announced. You'd think the Mozilla team would take a month or so off to recover. Guess this is one of the lesser-publicized advantages of OpenSource - vacation time is not an issue because the volunteers (those doing it out of love or a feeling of duty to the community) aren't being paid anyway!
It is my understanding that UnitedLinux is out there to ensure that no single player (i.e. RedHat) can become a new Microsoft (i.e. monopolist player) in the market. But what methods do you hope to use in order to meet that goal: specifically, do you see UnitedLinux as a means to wrest Linux users away from RedHat or do you see it as a means to increase the marketshare of Linux in general?
Being a Mac user (primarily), this is a question our community has had to deal with time and time again.
Well, it has been said for years that Relativity and Quantum Mechanics can not both be true without some deeper explanation (i.e. Supersymmetry or String theory). Perhaps this experiment will be the tie-breaker to tell us which is MORE right.
OK, I took a week or so off for a vacation and seem to have walked into a new firestorm of information here. I have read most of the UnitedLinux articles referenced at Slashdot and am still somewhat in the dark here.
Can someone tell me what the *intended*aim* of UnitedLinux: 1. To provide a standard "base Linux" to compete with RedHat? 2. To provide a single Linux to be distributed by all members? 3. To provide a single group for all communication/development outside of sales? 4. To provide a single face for customers (i.e. only marketting)?
It sounds like others in this thread are similarly confused. Course, that may be because the members of "United Linux" are a little confused on the aim themselves.
When you are the Federal Government there are a LOT of factors that you have to consider including security, stability, visibility, and cost-effectiveness. I am a MAJOR Mac fan and own several Macs. But Apple could be argued to have lost on all of these counts: 1. Security: MacOS X has only been around a short time and has no proven track record yet. Give it two more years and the beaurocrats might accept it. (Yes, I know. BSD has a HUGE track record, but try explaining BSD and OS X to your typical mouth-breather.) 2. Stability: While MacOS X is VERY stable, again it has no proven track record here. 3. Visibility: Macs (modern macs) always announce their presence. They are stylish devices which do not want to be hidden. This may not be good depending on who is stopping in to criticize you today. 4. Cost-effectiveness: Try explaining to a CBO accountant why you want to buy a $1200 iBook instead of a $500 bottom-barrel Wintel machine. Or better yet, try explaining it to a political columnist looking for an ax to grind.
Now, I am talking about MacOS X as that is what is shipping on all new Macs that the Feds might buy. OS 9 has similar issues.
My point is, these are all issues that Apple will need to convincingly overcome before the Feds will be knocking down their doors for units
Okay, as a long-time Mac user and a reader of Linux sites like this, I know that Windows carries a massively larger burden of virii than other Operating Systems out there. Time and time again, I have heard it said that this is due to their market share - hackers want to be seen and thus make their virii attackers of the software that most people have. But this really rings hollow for me - the MacOS has always been relatively free of virii, as has Linux, as has BSD, as has AmigaOS, as has BeOS etc. This seems to imply that maybe aside from marketshare, Microsoft engineers (or marketting staff) are doing something wrong.
Let's take a constructive approach to this topic. With so many SysAdmins out there, what are the TOP TEN things that Microsoft (or any OS maker) can do to prevent virii? I am just a humble Business Analyst, but here are a few ideas that come to mind for me (I hope the coders will forgive my ignorance on some of the finer points):
10. Disable scripting in certain programs (e-mail) by default. 9. Automatically download security pactches to PCs if they are of a sufficient severity level (but put measures in place to make sure the same mechanism is not used to transmit virii/worms) 8. Auto-detect large numbers of e-mails being sent at once and alert users before sending 7. Make the default install for all systems the most secure install 6. Create a system to auto-report virus/worm infections to a central (independent) agency for monitoring (user-selectable kill switch for this functionality should be available tho) 5. Allow purchase of "health insurance" for PCs by Microsoft to reimburse for lost productivity/hardware due to infection - monetary incentive for MS to push quality and security 4. Create a module of the OS to track virus reports/alerts and display them in the taskbar - produces one trusted source for alerts and to decrease the effectiveness of e-mail hoaxes 3. Integrate virus alert into mail program for incoming e-mails - advise users when a known large-scale e-mail virus/worm is out there to decrease openning of infected mail. 2. Give sysadmins the ability to change e-mail setting for all users when a large-scale outbreak is going, to specifically turn off scripting, html reading, java, etc. 1. Provide a method for a daily audit of all processes running on a machine to identify all those not initiated by the user, and flag those taking part in suspicious activity.
Not sure if those are insightful or lame. But feel free to improve upon this list, ad infinitum.
I don't know about the others around here, but the precise skill-set that I learned in college (C++, Assembly Language, Pascal, etc.) for computers has been FAR LESS useful in the real world than the IDEAS that I learned (how the machines work, proper analysis of a problem, translating business into systems terms). IF you are finding the exact skills you learned are not of use, try looking at the ideas and methods of thinking which you are now an expert on. They WILL be reuseable elsewhere.
For example, Knowing that tweaking a line of code will gain you a 0.11% increase in speed is no longer useful with the next compiler upgrade. Knowing how to track down minor inconsistencies and errors is useful in all kinds of jobs: police work, editorial work, actuarial work, etc. Don't look at what you learned to debug, look at HOW you learned to debug.
...has to be a front-runner here. Something as simple as a piece of paper and a light source showed that classical mechanics was not enough to explain our universe and that quantum mechanics had to be invented. No computers needed, no complex aparratus, and no genius needed to explain it (today).
Course, I am a physics freak. The biology, computer science, chemistry, etc. freaks may have their own opinions!;-)
I believe the problem so far is lack of volunteers for a MacOS X port. Sun and the OpenOffice groups both were pleading for developers a few months back, and near as I can tell there were few to no responses.
This may be a case where we want to just use the Linux port as a basis and use an X11 front-end, the way many are doing so for GIMP.
Course, we need a lot more coders before we make that happen.
My company decided to take a hard look around the shop and using a strong Performance Management System, cut all of the bottom performers entirely. They fired 6 people in a staff of 20 in the space of 3 months.
The good side to this is that the remaining people were the ones you want to keep - strong performers who brought out consistently good results. And they did use some more-or-less formalized and official measures, so it was not just "Who annoyed the boss today."
The bad side is that it showed a complete lack of loyalty to long-term employees. One was a 20 year veteran with a wealth of knowledge and another was a single mother in a tough situation, and those are just the ones easy to put into writing. This lead to a big hit in morale, which lead many of the top performers to leave because they had no problems finding other jobs.
Better than keeping everyone for a one-month 50% paycut? Maybe. It probably means better long-term health for the company. But it means worse short-term performance for a staff which is overworked and terminally depressed.
To be fair, I have no idea what I would do if I were a manager. This is why I have no interest in climbing the ladder of management.
> For the TiBook, 800Mhz is fast, don't get caught > up in comparing Mhz to Mhz when the chips are of > totally different architecture. What you really > need to be looking at is what the real world > results are with fully optimized programs on both > architectures.
This is a good point, but I was not really worried about the actual Megahertage from a real-world-action standpoint. But you have to admit that Apple (and AMD, too) is losing the P.R. war here in some ways. MHz is too EASY for sales folks to use in comparison, especially when the average CompUSA salesman knows PCs better. The smaller Apple keeps the gap the better, and it would be easier to dismiss the difference of 1 Ghz vs. 1.8 Ghz than 800 versus 1000, even though the real difference is larger in the former!
I must admit to being confused here. While the left side of my brain (rational) understands some of what is going on here, the right side (creative) which Apple usually caters to is highly confused about these two new additions to Apple's line-up -- especially the eMac.
800 MHz TiBook: What I *DO* get:
1. It is faster. Always good.
2. It is new. That will jump-start sales.
3. It has a new graphics chipset. Good for the graphics pros who use TiBooks. What I *DO*NOT* get:
1. This is NOT fast enough. 800 MHz is better, but why not 1 GHz? The Wintel portables are up there and Apple is too far behind the P.R. curve on this one. I know, I know: Heat and Supplies. But this is simply not enough of a speed increase.
2. When can we see a new form factor? Removable bays are sorely missed, for one. In my ever-so-humble opinion, the Pismo form was superior in most ways to this one. Course, a form factor change is probably better held off until July.
3. Was the enhanced graphics really for the graphics pros or the hard-core gamers???
eMac: What I *DO* get:
1. Education needs a cheap base Mac for their labs. This fits with the sub-$1000 price.
2. LCDs are expensive and hard-to-find right now. This alleviates the shortage in the education market.
3. This uses a form already known and accepted in education. Adding this to an existing iMac lab will not make it stand out too much.
4. Apple needs the education market happy in order to maintain its base. What I *DO*NOT* get:
1. Why the "eMac"? iMac for internet, eMac for education. Will the next thing be the oMac for use by IRS agents ("Owe Mac", get it?)? This seems to be diluting the brand and confusing buyers.
2. Why CRT when LCD is the way to go? Apple is pushing LCD (or some form of flatscreen) as the wave of the future. Why backtrack in this area only? If LCD is NOT the way to go, why not make the eMac available to all. If LCD IS the way to go, why not make it available for corporate and home users?
I agree with the other posters that I do not see this taking off as a pure e-book - after all none of the other e-book systems have really made it into the mainstream. But if you coupled in a grafiti-style system, this kind of thing could easily replace laptops for on-the-go professionals who do not need the full power of a laptop, but do want more than a Palm offers. Attach this thing to a wireless modem and you can surf the web with considerably more screen real-estate than a Palm or PocketPC, but without the bulk of a laptop.
I have an old Norand tablet PC and say what you will about their useability for some things. For surfing the Net on the couch, they are EXCELLENT!
> I like the idea of thinking about biological > and computer viruses in the same way.
This is an excellent idea and one that is coming closer and closer to being reality anyway, with the advances in DNA technology. How long will it be until providing the actual DNA coding (the machine-language code?) or some kind of metalanguage interprettable into pure DNA coding would allow someone to generate a real virus?
Suddenly, making the DNA code available for SmallPox is not purely a tool to aid in research for a cure - it could be used by a terrorist to CREATE a biological weapon.
It is a very fine line between the digital world and our world, and it gets thinner every day.
...or was that not a very flattering article. The post makes it sound like this was a victory for Mozila - being recognized by CNET. But my reading was that they basically said: 1. It is not really a "real" 1.0 release 2. It has always been buggy and not useable 3. It is not as mature as IE 4. AOL might switch to it, but only because of sour grapes 5. Its history shows it is unreliable 6. No one in their right mind would trust their future in Mozilla.
Maybe I read too much into it, but that was the sense I got. As someone who has been using Mozilla on Windows, Macintosh, and Linux since 0.8 or so, none of this has been my experience. It is more solid than IE, faster, and very reliable. It now has at least as many features as IE and crashes almost never on any of the platforms I have used it on.
A fact was mentioned during the Mariah Carey debacle (when her record company bought her out, rather than have to sell her songs at a loss) which may also be worth mentioning here:
Very few CDs and Songs tend to subsidize the rest of the industry!
When a CD is sold to you for a Big Name artist, the money that you are pulling in there does not only pay for the songs on the disk, but rather both that music and the other HUNDREDS of artists that record companies take a chance on each year which they take a loss on. If the record industry goes from an album-focussed business model to a song-based business model, you have a lot less value having to subsidize a lot more risk.
For example, let us assume that you want the song "Doowop Fever" from some new band, but the rest of the CD is not interesting to you. Right now, the record company gets $10 from you even though you only want one song. If they move to your model, they get only $2 from you and still have to subsidize the same volume of risk.
Of course, cutting CDs out of the process would also reduce production costs and distribution costs. But I doubt those savings would even out with the lost revenue.
The heart of the Net is American Culture
on
Heart of the Net
·
· Score: 1
I can't help thinking that the heart of the net is not "gone", but instead broadened. Whereas in the past it reflected one sub-set of American culture (usually a subset of the "techie" subset)now it has broadened to encompass most of American culture, good and bad. While Europe, the East, and Africa continue to provide good contributions, the Net (like movie and TV) have continued the evangelization of the world. The Net is uniquely american in its ideas of freedom and equality and capitalism, no matter where it is.
There is no information thereabouts on whether or not current Palm VII users (especially those committed for a year) can roll over their service to the Palm i705.
Though, personally, without a color screen and more RAM, I have no reason to pay $500 to upgrade.
The real question here is which helps science to progress the fastest?
The idea behind Dole/Baigh (as I see it here, I have not done exhaustive research) was to speed up science by injecting a profit motive into it. The ability to sell my science to Enron when the work is done is a HUGE motivator to spend 20 hours a day in the lab to get it done quickly to get paid quickly. If the government's goal in funding the research is to get out a cure for cancer today instead of 20 years from now, then the goal is met whether I have to release the formula to everyone or if Enron is the only producer.
On the other hand, requiring an Open Source release speeds up science by allowing others to build upon the past efforts of others. Thus, if my research were to figure out how cancer cells reproduce, then John Smith now has access to it, so he can produce HIS cure for cancer. This also might reduce the time from 20 years to 2 years.
The key is that either way, the government gets its cure for cancer, so from many lawmakers points of view, neither method is inherently better. This is probably a decision best made on a case-by-case basis. If the government is paying for someone to develop an extensible education system, then Open Source makes sense from a look-ahead point of view. If the government is paying for someone to develop a powerful a chemical analysis program to encourage drug development, then it may make sense to let Bayer buy it to produce the profit motive. The possibilities are too broad to entrench in law.
Slashdot Mirror
While it makes sense for Apple to buy these packages, it may not make sense to immediately assume the company will make them MacOS-only in either the long or short-term. There are a number of Apple technologies including AppleWorks (Formely ClarisWorks) and FileMaker Pro which continue to have Windows versions produced to this day. Rather, these purchases simply let Apple showcase the advantages of the MacOS X platform by *forcing* a port of these products to MacOS X and making sure that port takes the fullest advantage of the MacOS X toolsets.
At least that is my take.
Wow, Mozilla 1.0 was just released, with much pomp and circumstance (or if you read CNET, much weeping and gnashing of teeth) and already we are seeing a 1.1 milestone being announced. You'd think the Mozilla team would take a month or so off to recover. Guess this is one of the lesser-publicized advantages of OpenSource - vacation time is not an issue because the volunteers (those doing it out of love or a feeling of duty to the community) aren't being paid anyway!
It is my understanding that UnitedLinux is out there to ensure that no single player (i.e. RedHat) can become a new Microsoft (i.e. monopolist player) in the market. But what methods do you hope to use in order to meet that goal: specifically, do you see UnitedLinux as a means to wrest Linux users away from RedHat or do you see it as a means to increase the marketshare of Linux in general?
Being a Mac user (primarily), this is a question our community has had to deal with time and time again.
Well, it has been said for years that Relativity and Quantum Mechanics can not both be true without some deeper explanation (i.e. Supersymmetry or String theory). Perhaps this experiment will be the tie-breaker to tell us which is MORE right.
OK, I took a week or so off for a vacation and seem to have walked into a new firestorm of information here. I have read most of the UnitedLinux articles referenced at Slashdot and am still somewhat in the dark here.
;-)
Can someone tell me what the *intended*aim* of UnitedLinux:
1. To provide a standard "base Linux" to compete with RedHat?
2. To provide a single Linux to be distributed by all members?
3. To provide a single group for all communication/development outside of sales?
4. To provide a single face for customers (i.e. only marketting)?
It sounds like others in this thread are similarly confused. Course, that may be because the members of "United Linux" are a little confused on the aim themselves.
I humbly await enlightenment.
When you are the Federal Government there are a LOT of factors that you have to consider including security, stability, visibility, and cost-effectiveness. I am a MAJOR Mac fan and own several Macs. But Apple could be argued to have lost on all of these counts:
1. Security: MacOS X has only been around a short time and has no proven track record yet. Give it two more years and the beaurocrats might accept it. (Yes, I know. BSD has a HUGE track record, but try explaining BSD and OS X to your typical mouth-breather.)
2. Stability: While MacOS X is VERY stable, again it has no proven track record here.
3. Visibility: Macs (modern macs) always announce their presence. They are stylish devices which do not want to be hidden. This may not be good depending on who is stopping in to criticize you today.
4. Cost-effectiveness: Try explaining to a CBO accountant why you want to buy a $1200 iBook instead of a $500 bottom-barrel Wintel machine. Or better yet, try explaining it to a political columnist looking for an ax to grind.
Now, I am talking about MacOS X as that is what is shipping on all new Macs that the Feds might buy. OS 9 has similar issues.
My point is, these are all issues that Apple will need to convincingly overcome before the Feds will be knocking down their doors for units
Okay, as a long-time Mac user and a reader of Linux sites like this, I know that Windows carries a massively larger burden of virii than other Operating Systems out there. Time and time again, I have heard it said that this is due to their market share - hackers want to be seen and thus make their virii attackers of the software that most people have. But this really rings hollow for me - the MacOS has always been relatively free of virii, as has Linux, as has BSD, as has AmigaOS, as has BeOS etc. This seems to imply that maybe aside from marketshare, Microsoft engineers (or marketting staff) are doing something wrong.
Let's take a constructive approach to this topic. With so many SysAdmins out there, what are the TOP TEN things that Microsoft (or any OS maker) can do to prevent virii? I am just a humble Business Analyst, but here are a few ideas that come to mind for me (I hope the coders will forgive my ignorance on some of the finer points):
10. Disable scripting in certain programs (e-mail) by default.
9. Automatically download security pactches to PCs if they are of a sufficient severity level (but put measures in place to make sure the same mechanism is not used to transmit virii/worms)
8. Auto-detect large numbers of e-mails being sent at once and alert users before sending
7. Make the default install for all systems the most secure install
6. Create a system to auto-report virus/worm infections to a central (independent) agency for monitoring (user-selectable kill switch for this functionality should be available tho)
5. Allow purchase of "health insurance" for PCs by Microsoft to reimburse for lost productivity/hardware due to infection - monetary incentive for MS to push quality and security
4. Create a module of the OS to track virus reports/alerts and display them in the taskbar - produces one trusted source for alerts and to decrease the effectiveness of e-mail hoaxes
3. Integrate virus alert into mail program for incoming e-mails - advise users when a known large-scale e-mail virus/worm is out there to decrease openning of infected mail.
2. Give sysadmins the ability to change e-mail setting for all users when a large-scale outbreak is going, to specifically turn off scripting, html reading, java, etc.
1. Provide a method for a daily audit of all processes running on a machine to identify all those not initiated by the user, and flag those taking part in suspicious activity.
Not sure if those are insightful or lame. But feel free to improve upon this list, ad infinitum.
I don't know about the others around here, but the precise skill-set that I learned in college (C++, Assembly Language, Pascal, etc.) for computers has been FAR LESS useful in the real world than the IDEAS that I learned (how the machines work, proper analysis of a problem, translating business into systems terms). IF you are finding the exact skills you learned are not of use, try looking at the ideas and methods of thinking which you are now an expert on. They WILL be reuseable elsewhere.
For example, Knowing that tweaking a line of code will gain you a 0.11% increase in speed is no longer useful with the next compiler upgrade. Knowing how to track down minor inconsistencies and errors is useful in all kinds of jobs: police work, editorial work, actuarial work, etc. Don't look at what you learned to debug, look at HOW you learned to debug.
That is my two cents anyway.
...has to be a front-runner here. Something as simple as a piece of paper and a light source showed that classical mechanics was not enough to explain our universe and that quantum mechanics had to be invented. No computers needed, no complex aparratus, and no genius needed to explain it (today).
;-)
Course, I am a physics freak. The biology, computer science, chemistry, etc. freaks may have their own opinions!
...it brings a whole new meaning to the term WIRELESS MOUSE.
I believe the problem so far is lack of volunteers for a MacOS X port. Sun and the OpenOffice groups both were pleading for developers a few months back, and near as I can tell there were few to no responses.
This may be a case where we want to just use the Linux port as a basis and use an X11 front-end, the way many are doing so for GIMP.
Course, we need a lot more coders before we make that happen.
My company decided to take a hard look around the shop and using a strong Performance Management System, cut all of the bottom performers entirely. They fired 6 people in a staff of 20 in the space of 3 months.
The good side to this is that the remaining people were the ones you want to keep - strong performers who brought out consistently good results. And they did use some more-or-less formalized and official measures, so it was not just "Who annoyed the boss today."
The bad side is that it showed a complete lack of loyalty to long-term employees. One was a 20 year veteran with a wealth of knowledge and another was a single mother in a tough situation, and those are just the ones easy to put into writing. This lead to a big hit in morale, which lead many of the top performers to leave because they had no problems finding other jobs.
Better than keeping everyone for a one-month 50% paycut? Maybe. It probably means better long-term health for the company. But it means worse short-term performance for a staff which is overworked and terminally depressed.
To be fair, I have no idea what I would do if I were a manager. This is why I have no interest in climbing the ladder of management.
> For the TiBook, 800Mhz is fast, don't get caught
> up in comparing Mhz to Mhz when the chips are of
> totally different architecture. What you really
> need to be looking at is what the real world
> results are with fully optimized programs on both
> architectures.
This is a good point, but I was not really worried about the actual Megahertage from a real-world-action standpoint. But you have to admit that Apple (and AMD, too) is losing the P.R. war here in some ways. MHz is too EASY for sales folks to use in comparison, especially when the average CompUSA salesman knows PCs better. The smaller Apple keeps the gap the better, and it would be easier to dismiss the difference of 1 Ghz vs. 1.8 Ghz than 800 versus 1000, even though the real difference is larger in the former!
I must admit to being confused here. While the left side of my brain (rational) understands some of what is going on here, the right side (creative) which Apple usually caters to is highly confused about these two new additions to Apple's line-up -- especially the eMac.
800 MHz TiBook:
What I *DO* get:
1. It is faster. Always good.
2. It is new. That will jump-start sales.
3. It has a new graphics chipset. Good for the graphics pros who use TiBooks.
What I *DO*NOT* get:
1. This is NOT fast enough. 800 MHz is better, but why not 1 GHz? The Wintel portables are up there and Apple is too far behind the P.R. curve on this one. I know, I know: Heat and Supplies. But this is simply not enough of a speed increase.
2. When can we see a new form factor? Removable bays are sorely missed, for one. In my ever-so-humble opinion, the Pismo form was superior in most ways to this one. Course, a form factor change is probably better held off until July.
3. Was the enhanced graphics really for the graphics pros or the hard-core gamers???
eMac:
What I *DO* get:
1. Education needs a cheap base Mac for their labs. This fits with the sub-$1000 price.
2. LCDs are expensive and hard-to-find right now. This alleviates the shortage in the education market.
3. This uses a form already known and accepted in education. Adding this to an existing iMac lab will not make it stand out too much.
4. Apple needs the education market happy in order to maintain its base.
What I *DO*NOT* get:
1. Why the "eMac"? iMac for internet, eMac for education. Will the next thing be the oMac for use by IRS agents ("Owe Mac", get it?)? This seems to be diluting the brand and confusing buyers.
2. Why CRT when LCD is the way to go? Apple is pushing LCD (or some form of flatscreen) as the wave of the future. Why backtrack in this area only? If LCD is NOT the way to go, why not make the eMac available to all. If LCD IS the way to go, why not make it available for corporate and home users?
My Two Cents.
I agree with the other posters that I do not see this taking off as a pure e-book - after all none of the other e-book systems have really made it into the mainstream. But if you coupled in a grafiti-style system, this kind of thing could easily replace laptops for on-the-go professionals who do not need the full power of a laptop, but do want more than a Palm offers. Attach this thing to a wireless modem and you can surf the web with considerably more screen real-estate than a Palm or PocketPC, but without the bulk of a laptop.
I have an old Norand tablet PC and say what you will about their useability for some things. For surfing the Net on the couch, they are EXCELLENT!
> I like the idea of thinking about biological
> and computer viruses in the same way.
This is an excellent idea and one that is coming closer and closer to being reality anyway, with the advances in DNA technology. How long will it be until providing the actual DNA coding (the machine-language code?) or some kind of metalanguage interprettable into pure DNA coding would allow someone to generate a real virus?
Suddenly, making the DNA code available for SmallPox is not purely a tool to aid in research for a cure - it could be used by a terrorist to CREATE a biological weapon.
It is a very fine line between the digital world and our world, and it gets thinner every day.
...or was that not a very flattering article. The post makes it sound like this was a victory for Mozila - being recognized by CNET. But my reading was that they basically said:
1. It is not really a "real" 1.0 release
2. It has always been buggy and not useable
3. It is not as mature as IE
4. AOL might switch to it, but only because of sour grapes
5. Its history shows it is unreliable
6. No one in their right mind would trust their future in Mozilla.
Maybe I read too much into it, but that was the sense I got. As someone who has been using Mozilla on Windows, Macintosh, and Linux since 0.8 or so, none of this has been my experience. It is more solid than IE, faster, and very reliable. It now has at least as many features as IE and crashes almost never on any of the platforms I have used it on.
A fact was mentioned during the Mariah Carey debacle (when her record company bought her out, rather than have to sell her songs at a loss) which may also be worth mentioning here:
Very few CDs and Songs tend to subsidize the rest of the industry!
When a CD is sold to you for a Big Name artist, the money that you are pulling in there does not only pay for the songs on the disk, but rather both that music and the other HUNDREDS of artists that record companies take a chance on each year which they take a loss on. If the record industry goes from an album-focussed business model to a song-based business model, you have a lot less value having to subsidize a lot more risk.
For example, let us assume that you want the song "Doowop Fever" from some new band, but the rest of the CD is not interesting to you. Right now, the record company gets $10 from you even though you only want one song. If they move to your model, they get only $2 from you and still have to subsidize the same volume of risk.
Of course, cutting CDs out of the process would also reduce production costs and distribution costs. But I doubt those savings would even out with the lost revenue.
I can't help thinking that the heart of the net is not "gone", but instead broadened. Whereas in the past it reflected one sub-set of American culture (usually a subset of the "techie" subset)now it has broadened to encompass most of American culture, good and bad. While Europe, the East, and Africa continue to provide good contributions, the Net (like movie and TV) have continued the evangelization of the world. The Net is uniquely american in its ideas of freedom and equality and capitalism, no matter where it is.
Though, personally, without a color screen and more RAM, I have no reason to pay $500 to upgrade.
The idea behind Dole/Baigh (as I see it here, I have not done exhaustive research) was to speed up science by injecting a profit motive into it. The ability to sell my science to Enron when the work is done is a HUGE motivator to spend 20 hours a day in the lab to get it done quickly to get paid quickly. If the government's goal in funding the research is to get out a cure for cancer today instead of 20 years from now, then the goal is met whether I have to release the formula to everyone or if Enron is the only producer.
On the other hand, requiring an Open Source release speeds up science by allowing others to build upon the past efforts of others. Thus, if my research were to figure out how cancer cells reproduce, then John Smith now has access to it, so he can produce HIS cure for cancer. This also might reduce the time from 20 years to 2 years.
The key is that either way, the government gets its cure for cancer, so from many lawmakers points of view, neither method is inherently better. This is probably a decision best made on a case-by-case basis. If the government is paying for someone to develop an extensible education system, then Open Source makes sense from a look-ahead point of view. If the government is paying for someone to develop a powerful a chemical analysis program to encourage drug development, then it may make sense to let Bayer buy it to produce the profit motive. The possibilities are too broad to entrench in law.