It's a bit fitting that a guy who sumbits a story about a release from a company named "Trolltech" uses the term "Windoze" in his submission. Oh well, sounds like a nice piece of software, hope I'm not wasting everyone's time.
This is an interesting figure, but I'd like to see the numbers of migrations compared to past years. Is this flip because more people are converting from Windows or is it because those that are going to move from proprietary unix to Linux have already made the conversion. Are windows migrations increasing, or unix migrations decreasing? Or both, or what? This is an interesting stat, but fairly meaningless without more information...
True, if they could offer the top card at $200 bucks, noone would buy the top card of their competitor. I don't think the economics justify that. Also, doing that would kill any further revenues from their former high end cards (now the mid-range). The very high end is always very expensive. It allows the companies to make some good money at the expense of the richest / most demanding. The rest of us reap the benifits 6-12 months down the road when the technology those with cash paid dearly to develop trickles down into affordable price ranges.
I'm sure you know this and I'm not really sure why I responded, but there it is.
The court had a bunch to do with his being declared president, but let's face it. There was a tie, and the random chance in florida fell his way. Now, even if the court was largely conservative and supported a conservative canidate, which is debateable, why does that then decide all their decisions? Several of their recent death penalty decisions have been more liberal than expected (not liberal enough for me). The is no real evidence that they cater to the president's every whim.
Why do they have a vested interest in him? They keep their jobs and can do as they please whether he is a success or not. You might argue that if he succeeds he is more likely to appoint more conservative judges to the court and so the most conservative factions might help him out. However, this court has been very professional and is very evenly divided. It's hard to imagine them making decisions in order to help out a member of the executive branch. The court considers itself to be above such political games. As a registered Democrat, I would have no problem bringing a solid case to this court.
Another point. The supreme court was never about doing what was neccassarily best for America. That's not what they are there for. They are there for the purpose of understanding and interpretting the Constitution and applying constituational law. Fair use, for instance, is probably in the public interest but does not occupy a prominent position in the Constituation. Therefore, taking a fair use case to the high court would be a waste of breath. One would have to make an arguement along the lines of 1st amendment rights or something more creative.
People who would benifit most from being in the same place day in and day out tend to not be impacted by this sort of program. Your engineering types will still have offices with thier names attatched more often than not. People who are frequently out of the office, either working at home or on the road selling stuff and are used to bringing their supplies and notes with them, are perfect canidates. Why have 10 desks for salesmen who are out of the office 50% of the time? Six or seven would probably be enough to go around.
Basically, the folks at Sun aren't morons and won't try to impose this sort of chaos on people who will tend towards order. Instead they take the chaotic situation of people who are either moving around a lot or frequently on the road or at home and try to simplify that experiance. Prior to this system being in place, probably 5-10% of sun's offices were drop in offices. Anyone could use that space. The flexibility that gave folks was so appealing they enlarged the program to a new level for certain groups of people.
They realize Linux is popular and are building a bridge between their own high end stuff and more low end linux stuff. They are also improving their chances of being able to bail on Solaris and switch to Linux if that need arises in the next five or ten years. They also want to bring things like SunONE to Linux so SunONE will gain share over.NET. Long term, as mentioned in another recent interview, they'd like the OS of a machine to not matter much at all. Instead, your whole datacenter would be managed as some sort of super-cluster with Sparcs and x86s and whatever all running your favorite flavor and all working together and managed centrally.
Solaris provides the ability to scale, and has some pretty sweet reliability features. Scaling is one of those things Sun really cares about and that's why it's one of those criteria that it uses to measure itself against Linux. In the world of big servers, it's not so much about being 5% faster. It's about not crashing and being able to add more power with minimal or 0 downtime. Even look at IBM. Where it's using Linux, it frequently has a layer of mainframe or midframe proprietary OS hiding underneath to manage the nasties that Linux just isn't ready to handle yet.
The big problem is that cartridge sales are the big money maker. They sell printers on the cheap so they can sell catridges for those printers. If cartridges become easily refillable, then the printer companies will need to raise prices on printers dramatically.
Right, I agree that when there's something nasty and unexpected in there, like removing ad-aware, they are wrong. I feel that most really just afirm what you would expect the deal to be and just clarify the matter before you make a final commitment (installing). There should always be a mechanism to not accept and get a refund. In regards to downloads, some do it the right way. You have to click through the EULA before getting to the download page.
Could observation. I think Linux is still important in the shipping hardware out the door long term strategy. The other part of that is making sure Microsoft doesn't sell the world's software for servers. The SunONE /.NET battle is gonna be cool. SunONE is complete now but parts are weak and marketting has been poor..NET framework is 80-90% complete MS centric and very well hyped. As an average suit and they'll tell you Microsoft invented web services. This is the other fun battle to watch. Sun's bringing open standards to the table against MS and they are going to try and beat eachother to death. Sun has initial developer mindshare (Java Good) while MS gets initial suit mindshare (MS says they are better, MS doen't lie). Gonna be fun to watch. This IBM/MS alliance is scary though.
I just don't get this assumption that Sun would sell Linux on Sparc for less than Solaris on Sparc. Like piles of other stuff, the OS is just something bundled for free to ship hardware. Now, if you're another company reselling sparcs with solaris (fujitsu), Sun's going to make u pay a license fee. You run Solaris because it scales to 106 processors better and you want to have binary compatibility between your $1000 workstation and massive server. What Sun needs to do is make the application transfer seemless between Solaris Sparc and Sun Linux on x86. Then they can incorporate cheap servers into their seemless stack. Only IBM really has the capability to compete with them in delivering a total stack. Dell can fight for the low end, EMC can grab a bunch of storage, HP-Compaq are falling out of the server wolrd. When it comes to delivering tiny to huge computers, storage and software. It's a two horse race.
This is retirement season at Sun. They tend to change things up and do re-orgs when their fiscal year rolls over in July. About this time, they need to stary announcing what these changes are going to be. This means that when Ed Zander tell Scott he'd like to retire sometime last year. Scott says, "sure, we'll let the world know end of April/early may." That's why these changes tend to come in bunches for Sun at this time of year.
The other big thing is that Sun does best when it has it's back to the wall. Look at it's history and time and time again, people have said Sun will be dead in 2 or 3 years. It has thusfar managed to reinvent itself. It's in that position now. It has changed it's look (purple is gone), is rebranding its product line and knows it needs to play well with Linux. That their Linux head is leaving might indicate either a frustration with Sun from him, or a new dedication to Linux from Sun. Sun might want to see more from that group. Or it might be folding it's Linux efforts in closer to the Solaris group.
Sun sees itself as having survived the nastiest downturn it has faced. It's letting people leave who wanted to leave a year and a half ago. It's also gearing up to reinvent itself and go kick butt. I think it's going to be fun to watch and see if they pull it off or not.
How are all EULAs morally wrong? If I want to sell software on a per-machine basis, I can make you agree either in a paper contract or a EULA that you'll only install it on one machine. If you were to abolish the EULA, I as a developer, would refuse to grant you license to use the software unless you were to sign a paper contract. Or I could do something draconian like build in enforcement of 1 pc into my software. Most contracts and EULAs have an important thing in them. The company selling you the stuff owns the software. You own the CD. They merely are selling you the right to use the software under certain conditions. In principal, this is a reasonable thing to do and not immoral at all.
Two things brought up are immoral. The first is unreasonable contracts that realistically are rarely read. Unreasonable contracts can be thrown out in court. Also, using unreasonable contracts to harrass people is also slimy. These techniques are underhandy, slimy, mean and hard to defend.
The other thing is say things like, "X is immoral" or evil or the bane of the free world without supporting it. That's just slinging trash around. The only arguement I can see that all EULAs are immoral is that software should be Free etc etc. That one is still up for debate.
Basically though, a good EULA is like any other good contract. It clarifies the intent behind the sale and lays down what each party should expect from the other. It lets the user know that if the software blows up the computer, the company selling it won't help. Not helping might be bad, but at least there is acknowledgement of what behavior is expected. At the same time, the end user agrees not to try to burn 50 copies and sell them on the open market.
Bad EULAs can be used to underhandedly impose the will of a company on the user. A good one clarifies what is expected of the parties. Good ones are not morally wrong. It's sloppy to say that EULAs are morally wrong in general.
I think there was some discussion of this in France a little while ago. I might be wrong though. The US media absolutely sucks at reporting about the rest of the world although it has done a decent job with problems in the middle east. I get most of my world news from the BBC world service courtesy of National Public Radio late at night. But yeah, the mass production of goods stuff is interesting. I'm personally torn between viewing this as exploitation and as exporting jobs. American Unions want great pay and benifits for people in SE Asia so the SE Asians don't get the jobs the American Unions want. However, low paying jobs in poor working conditions are low paying jobs in poor working conditions.
It's a shame you have been such a jerk to people and earned yourself a -1 posting.
Some of the American economy is based on the "exploitation" of other countries. I mean, we farm out very low paying jobs to countries where people need any job and even a very low paying ones help. There's other things, like cocoa market which are far worse, but I'd like to leave it there.
What the obnoxious poster is saying, and is quite right, is that weaker worker protection benifits the economy (and perhaps workers) as a whole. In many countries, particularly in Europe, a company simple can not demand as much from its workers. It's harder to fire them, harder to get them to work overtime and harder not give out very large amounts of vacation. Many entrapeneurs looking to enter the high tech market have left Europe to go to the US where they could found a company without as much risk imposed by worker protection. This, in effect, results in a flow of high paying jobs from Europe to United States. This partly explains the much lower unemployment rate in the US and the vigor of it's economy.
Many countries, I believe France and Italy included, are now examining their laws and trying to determine if lessening worker protections would be better. This is, of course, being met with stiff opposition from unions and such. It's interesting. I'd love to see an economist come and discuss this with us.
Excactly. Just cutting people's pay is a sign of disrespect for your employees, especially if the execs are getting bonuses. If you're in a position where this sort of drastic measure is needed, what are we rewarding the execs for? Anyway, mandatory unpaid vacation would be much more appropriate. For a company that's in less of a bind, they could follow Sun's approach of mandatory (mostly paid) vacation to clear vacation time liability off the books and save on facilities costs.
Yup, and StarOffice will be dirt cheap for educational purposes and will have more support. I would like to see my school drop one of these packages in place of MS Office in some lab and see if it affects use of that lab relative the one next door to it.
I mentioned this elsewhere. The 10K/seat is, as I understand it, only charged to commercial interests. The software manufacturers give it to universities on the cheap to drive sales in commerce later. Also, two programmers working for a year are not going to develop an excellent, complicated high functionality application of this scale. I'm regretting using the chem. software example already. I should have picked an example I had more details on.
I agree with you on this. I was simply attacking the notion that you could tell the BSA to go to hell and eliminate all their software from your campus.
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It's a bit fitting that a guy who sumbits a story about a release from a company named "Trolltech" uses the term "Windoze" in his submission. Oh well, sounds like a nice piece of software, hope I'm not wasting everyone's time.
Now there's an interesting possibility I hadn't thought of. I read your comment and thought, "well duh." Nice point, thanks.
maybe I need to read the article.
I'm sure you know this and I'm not really sure why I responded, but there it is.
Why do they have a vested interest in him? They keep their jobs and can do as they please whether he is a success or not. You might argue that if he succeeds he is more likely to appoint more conservative judges to the court and so the most conservative factions might help him out. However, this court has been very professional and is very evenly divided. It's hard to imagine them making decisions in order to help out a member of the executive branch. The court considers itself to be above such political games. As a registered Democrat, I would have no problem bringing a solid case to this court.
Another point. The supreme court was never about doing what was neccassarily best for America. That's not what they are there for. They are there for the purpose of understanding and interpretting the Constitution and applying constituational law. Fair use, for instance, is probably in the public interest but does not occupy a prominent position in the Constituation. Therefore, taking a fair use case to the high court would be a waste of breath. One would have to make an arguement along the lines of 1st amendment rights or something more creative.
Basically, the folks at Sun aren't morons and won't try to impose this sort of chaos on people who will tend towards order. Instead they take the chaotic situation of people who are either moving around a lot or frequently on the road or at home and try to simplify that experiance. Prior to this system being in place, probably 5-10% of sun's offices were drop in offices. Anyone could use that space. The flexibility that gave folks was so appealing they enlarged the program to a new level for certain groups of people.
They realize Linux is popular and are building a bridge between their own high end stuff and more low end linux stuff. They are also improving their chances of being able to bail on Solaris and switch to Linux if that need arises in the next five or ten years. They also want to bring things like SunONE to Linux so SunONE will gain share over
Solaris provides the ability to scale, and has some pretty sweet reliability features. Scaling is one of those things Sun really cares about and that's why it's one of those criteria that it uses to measure itself against Linux. In the world of big servers, it's not so much about being 5% faster. It's about not crashing and being able to add more power with minimal or 0 downtime. Even look at IBM. Where it's using Linux, it frequently has a layer of mainframe or midframe proprietary OS hiding underneath to manage the nasties that Linux just isn't ready to handle yet.
The big problem is that cartridge sales are the big money maker. They sell printers on the cheap so they can sell catridges for those printers. If cartridges become easily refillable, then the printer companies will need to raise prices on printers dramatically.
You're right that it's a cluster, but not a Beowulf cluster. Instead it's just a cluster-f... ah nevermind.
I think this merger is best described as a head-on train wreck in slow motion. At least they're coming together.
Right, I agree that when there's something nasty and unexpected in there, like removing ad-aware, they are wrong. I feel that most really just afirm what you would expect the deal to be and just clarify the matter before you make a final commitment (installing). There should always be a mechanism to not accept and get a refund. In regards to downloads, some do it the right way. You have to click through the EULA before getting to the download page.
Could observation. I think Linux is still important in the shipping hardware out the door long term strategy. The other part of that is making sure Microsoft doesn't sell the world's software for servers. The SunONE / .NET battle is gonna be cool. SunONE is complete now but parts are weak and marketting has been poor. .NET framework is 80-90% complete MS centric and very well hyped. As an average suit and they'll tell you Microsoft invented web services. This is the other fun battle to watch. Sun's bringing open standards to the table against MS and they are going to try and beat eachother to death. Sun has initial developer mindshare (Java Good) while MS gets initial suit mindshare (MS says they are better, MS doen't lie). /MS alliance is scary though.
Gonna be fun to watch. This IBM
I just don't get this assumption that Sun would sell Linux on Sparc for less than Solaris on Sparc. Like piles of other stuff, the OS is just something bundled for free to ship hardware. Now, if you're another company reselling sparcs with solaris (fujitsu), Sun's going to make u pay a license fee. You run Solaris because it scales to 106 processors better and you want to have binary compatibility between your $1000 workstation and massive server. What Sun needs to do is make the application transfer seemless between Solaris Sparc and Sun Linux on x86. Then they can incorporate cheap servers into their seemless stack. Only IBM really has the capability to compete with them in delivering a total stack. Dell can fight for the low end, EMC can grab a bunch of storage, HP-Compaq are falling out of the server wolrd. When it comes to delivering tiny to huge computers, storage and software. It's a two horse race.
This is retirement season at Sun. They tend to change things up and do re-orgs when their fiscal year rolls over in July. About this time, they need to stary announcing what these changes are going to be. This means that when Ed Zander tell Scott he'd like to retire sometime last year. Scott says, "sure, we'll let the world know end of April/early may." That's why these changes tend to come in bunches for Sun at this time of year.
The other big thing is that Sun does best when it has it's back to the wall. Look at it's history and time and time again, people have said Sun will be dead in 2 or 3 years. It has thusfar managed to reinvent itself. It's in that position now. It has changed it's look (purple is gone), is rebranding its product line and knows it needs to play well with Linux. That their Linux head is leaving might indicate either a frustration with Sun from him, or a new dedication to Linux from Sun. Sun might want to see more from that group. Or it might be folding it's Linux efforts in closer to the Solaris group.
Sun sees itself as having survived the nastiest downturn it has faced. It's letting people leave who wanted to leave a year and a half ago. It's also gearing up to reinvent itself and go kick butt. I think it's going to be fun to watch and see if they pull it off or not.
So this would all be good if software manufacturers had a flap on their box which contained the EULA?
Two things brought up are immoral. The first is unreasonable contracts that realistically are rarely read. Unreasonable contracts can be thrown out in court. Also, using unreasonable contracts to harrass people is also slimy. These techniques are underhandy, slimy, mean and hard to defend.
The other thing is say things like, "X is immoral" or evil or the bane of the free world without supporting it. That's just slinging trash around. The only arguement I can see that all EULAs are immoral is that software should be Free etc etc. That one is still up for debate.
Basically though, a good EULA is like any other good contract. It clarifies the intent behind the sale and lays down what each party should expect from the other. It lets the user know that if the software blows up the computer, the company selling it won't help. Not helping might be bad, but at least there is acknowledgement of what behavior is expected. At the same time, the end user agrees not to try to burn 50 copies and sell them on the open market.
Bad EULAs can be used to underhandedly impose the will of a company on the user. A good one clarifies what is expected of the parties. Good ones are not morally wrong. It's sloppy to say that EULAs are morally wrong in general.
I think there was some discussion of this in France a little while ago. I might be wrong though. The US media absolutely sucks at reporting about the rest of the world although it has done a decent job with problems in the middle east. I get most of my world news from the BBC world service courtesy of National Public Radio late at night. But yeah, the mass production of goods stuff is interesting. I'm personally torn between viewing this as exploitation and as exporting jobs. American Unions want great pay and benifits for people in SE Asia so the SE Asians don't get the jobs the American Unions want. However, low paying jobs in poor working conditions are low paying jobs in poor working conditions.
It's a shame you have been such a jerk to people and earned yourself a -1 posting.
What the obnoxious poster is saying, and is quite right, is that weaker worker protection benifits the economy (and perhaps workers) as a whole. In many countries, particularly in Europe, a company simple can not demand as much from its workers. It's harder to fire them, harder to get them to work overtime and harder not give out very large amounts of vacation. Many entrapeneurs looking to enter the high tech market have left Europe to go to the US where they could found a company without as much risk imposed by worker protection. This, in effect, results in a flow of high paying jobs from Europe to United States. This partly explains the much lower unemployment rate in the US and the vigor of it's economy.
Many countries, I believe France and Italy included, are now examining their laws and trying to determine if lessening worker protections would be better. This is, of course, being met with stiff opposition from unions and such. It's interesting. I'd love to see an economist come and discuss this with us.
Excactly. Just cutting people's pay is a sign of disrespect for your employees, especially if the execs are getting bonuses. If you're in a position where this sort of drastic measure is needed, what are we rewarding the execs for? Anyway, mandatory unpaid vacation would be much more appropriate. For a company that's in less of a bind, they could follow Sun's approach of mandatory (mostly paid) vacation to clear vacation time liability off the books and save on facilities costs.
Yup, and StarOffice will be dirt cheap for educational purposes and will have more support. I would like to see my school drop one of these packages in place of MS Office in some lab and see if it affects use of that lab relative the one next door to it.
I agree.
The feeling is mutual.
I mentioned this elsewhere. The 10K/seat is, as I understand it, only charged to commercial interests. The software manufacturers give it to universities on the cheap to drive sales in commerce later. Also, two programmers working for a year are not going to develop an excellent, complicated high functionality application of this scale. I'm regretting using the chem. software example already. I should have picked an example I had more details on.
I agree with you on this. I was simply attacking the notion that you could tell the BSA to go to hell and eliminate all their software from your campus.