Check the stock price...MS is going where that stock is going so until it heads south they are not in trouble. MS is a corporation where general public opinion doesn't matter that much and technical opinion matters even less. What really effects their bottom line is corporate and financial market optinion. They don't seem to even see the cracks in the empire yet. Heck, I bet that all the pundits predicting their demise are buying stock right now. All things do come to an end but I don't think that MS is going anywhere soon. There is still one tactic that they have not tried yet: making high quality, inexpensive software. MS could do it. They do have a lot of smart people working there. Their products lack quality often due to unreasonable deadlines and impossible requirements. I don't blame the programmers. I blame the managers and higher ups.
What if MS decided to give all those softies a chance to do things right?
MS has had several class action suites placed against it for not delivering what their software promises. Also, they have been sued for charging to fix things that were advertised to work in the first place. All of these things were either lost in appeals court or settled out of court. Either way, MS payed money from their unlimited supply to get out of it. Luckily they can not (legally) offer money to the Doj but there are those appeals... Companies have been sued for making faulty products before and have lost even with "iron" contracts that are supposed to protect them. MS could be next. The trial and findings of fact may open the flood gates.
Wouldn't it great if companies were required by law to make software that works?
This seems to be the case with much of the PC world. The best marketed software because the most popular and it feeds on itself. This "network" effect is very powerful. Although I consider Linux to be of high quality some of its current success comes from quantity. At my old university I saw lots of CS student installing Linux. This sounds great but I was a bit disheartened when I realized that many of them were just trying it because all the other CS people were using it. I would rather Linux win than lose but if I could choose I would rather it win by quality than quantity.
Even after their fantastic IPO, RedHat is still nothing compared to MS. They could buy every single distributer of Linux and then stop pushing it out. I don't think that they could kill Linux but they could really slow down its growth or weaken it. They have nearly unlimited resources and have shown repeatedly that they are willing to use them. This is why the trial is so important. If this trial fails, MS will come lash out at Linux and all of Microsoft's competitors with a vengence. MS will try to force the OEMs to go back to only MS software. Their power, if unrestrained, is absolute. Absolute power corrupts absolutly so they need to be restrained. Let's hope that they are not above the law.
Micro$oft is at it again. Buying and controlling everything in site. The techno-entroprenour's dream used to be to unseat microsoft from power. Now it is to be purchased by them. Depressing. Sure, in this case MS did not buy them. They only used their money to control them. "Be nice to MS and we will give you the world...otherwise we will crush you!" I hope that they keep this kind of thing up because I think that their arrogance will prove to be their undoing. You can only thumb your nose at the law for so long before the law has enough. This will not be like the IBM case. MS seems to really believe that they are right. If they are right, why should they change (or at least soften) their business practices? The day of the big announcement of Findings of Fact also came an investment in Telligent by MS. Then came Hoshin GigaMedia Centre and RadioShack. It will be interesting to see how they try to appeal the judge's Findings of Fact in court while proving them in their business practices. What do you all think? Will these type of actions affect their appeal process?
Is it possible that Linux, the Open Source Movement, and the Internet could change a country? I hope that China opens up more but I worry about the government's tight control over ISPs and general information exchange. I think it is great that Linux is alive and well in China and all over the world but I wonder what it will take for more than just the source to be open in China? A free and open exchange of information is one of the most important freemdoms that every man, women, and child should have. These are the ideas that helped make Linux what it is today and allow sites like/. to host all the peoples opinions, not just the privileged few. What can those of us that have this freedom do to help those that do not? Good luck to all those fighting the good fight over in China and everywhere else!
Most people that work on Internet related projects do it because they like it. Sure, their are other issues, but if you look at very smart people, they tend to work exactly where they want to because they can. This leads one to think that rather then stealing a mind away from another industry, the internet has allowed a mind to work where it is happiest and thus most productive. You could have everyone in the world work on a cure for cancer. If you did I am sure a cure would be found much faster but at the same time the world would starve without food, freeze without power and in general fall apart. Lots of people would be working on a good thing but doing it very badly because they are don't like being a researcher. FED chief Allen Greenspan has been sited as saying that increased productivity of the american worker, especially in the technology industry, is one of the biggest reasons for our boom. People are most productive when they are happy. Smart people that are making a lot of money with internet companies are working where they are most productive. 100 years ago they might not be there. I am programmer. It is what I eat, sleep, and drink (to borrow from my company's ads). 100 years ago, I would have been doing something else but I know that I wouldn't have as productive because I wouldn't have been as happy doing anything else as I am programming today. There is no shortage of workers in other fields because too many "smart people" are going into the internet. To be honest, the opposite is true. Not enough very smart people are geting involved with the internet and the tech. industry in general. Companies are begging the government to raise immigration limits so that more IT people from other countries can help meet the demand. The demand is so high their are too many people in the IT industry that are not smart enough. Their are tons of people who never studied comp. sci. or EE in college working on important things in the industry. This opens the door for lots of buggy software and hardware and less productivity for people that use this technology. In the old days only a few elite people wrote a program or maintained a server. Now anyone that can run the Visual C++ tutorial writes applications. Anyone that can access the Windows NT Help runs a server. My mother's firm used the head of their accounting department because, "he seems pretty good with computers." Further proof of this opposite effect is the male to female ratio in most tech. jobs and in EE and comp sci. university classes. It is horrible. Millions of very smart women are not going into this industry and I feel it is for the wrong reasons. I do not believe it is because all of them just don't like it. Many are not exposed to it or are pushed away from it. This theme extends to math and science in general. It is still a widely believed but unproven thought that women are not as good in math and science as men. Garbage! It is a fact that statistics show men are called on far more often then women in math and science classrooms. This is a very real problem!
It is very easy to misinterpret empirical evidence. What the evidence doesn't show is why the decrease occurs. Our society is far less respectiful of our elders than many others in the world. The job market (especially the computer industry) pushes them out. TV doesn't seems not to have shows with anyone over 25 that isn't the parent of a leading character. This kind of attitude doesn't help someone older feel smart or flexible. What is really strange to think is that our country is run by people much older than this hip teens to twenties age group. If people get older and lose mental faculties than how can you explain some of the senior cititzens in the senate that still have all their marbles. What about the FED? Allen Greenspan is a genius. He is able to understand a large interconnected world macro economy better than anyone. He has helped creat the longest time or prosperity that this nation has seen in quite awhile. He is losing fluid intelligence? Lord, I hope not! I know a couple of people that work in the New York office and they say that Greenspan is as sharp as ever. Then comes industry. Forget the new "billionaire before thrity" thing that Bill Gates started. Most CEOs of big successful companies are older people. How can you explain this? If you are right then we have a lot to worry about when it comes to voting. As you go up in age group the percentage of registered voters that actually go vote increases. Older people are a powerful voting block that always gets out. Meanwhile the youth of this coutry wine about needing internet voting to make it easier. If grandpa can walk there on his walker, then we should be out there. It comes down to what individuals do. My mother is a 50 something accountant. She has done accounting for years and spent most of the last 15 with the same company using the same software. She has gotten a bit set in her ways. It is no surprise that when her boss left and she assumed some of his duties including handling investments and some system administration, she was a bit worried. She panicked a few times but now she is getting the hang of it. She learned it faster than a lot of the kids in my CS and Finance classes in college. Speaking of college, how come adults who go back to school do routinly better on average than their younger "smarter" counterparts? It is not that people lose the ability to learn, it's just that they get out of the habit and get into the habit of doing the same thing every day. All changes create stress, even good things like learning something new. As people get older they learn to avoid stress. This normaly healthy reaction can have very unhealthy results as older people start to fear learning new things. People that have not been burned by stress as much do not have as much fear of new things. This is why some older people will not touch a computer, while others run their own irc chat group.
"This shows that the only reason Sun is opening up their source for any reason is so that they can get developers to fix their code, without really having to pay them."
I don't think so. I agree that Sun has tried to get some "open source" press through this agreement but I don't feel they really expect to get major help from the outside. They are not cutting down their OS programming force. Look at Mozilla; a lot of people have contributed but the bulk of the work has been done by Netscape (now AOL) people. Even with Linux, the bulk of the work is done by a relativly small group of people. At least Sun is a step ahead of MS. MS publishes some of their APIs but does not let you see source or even explain how they are implemented. Half of their APIs are barely even documented at all.
No can really expect Sun to embrace Linux until Linux really catches up in high level scalability on Sparc based systems. Sun's whole reason for Solaris is to sell hardware. They use the same model that has been around forever. They don't want people using Linux because they are either using it on non-Sun hardware (bad for them) or using it on Sun hardware but not paying for support/services from Sun (bad for them again). Sun doesn't want the low end market. They want to make sure that people don't start thinking that Linux on a dual PIII can run the same enterprise system that a big fact mutliprocessor Ultra Sparc can do.
Sort of open or sort of closed, Sun just can't win. If you used Solaris and you found a bug but you couldn't track it down and fix it yourself, you would be angry at them. If you could check the source and fix it and get it into the next gen, you still wouldn't be happy because you did work for a corporation for free whiel they make money off of it. If they switched to Linux and used the GPL, Sun would have to spend a lot of time and money putting in all the high performance features they already have in Solaris (retro fitting an OS is not fun!). And then give it away. There is a big difference between somebody devoting their personal time to an Open Source project and a company devoting lots of money to an open source project. "Fellow board members...I propose a project that will make us zero dollors in new revenue and cost hundreds of man hours but will really boost our reputation with young programmers! And it's the right thing to do!" They could save the money by switching to Linux and waiting for a group they have no control over (the Linux Kernel gang) to get the features in while their OS performance and thus their hardware worth drops. They lose again.
What do you expect? Sun is a corporation! They pay their programmers lots of money. It is a pretty good idea for them to take come control over what they make since they have to support it and it carries their name on it. If they just plain opened up everything they risk really bad versions of what was their stuff getting out and causing big problems. Imagine the E-bay disaster only this time the change that causes the crash was made by some random guy on the net with his own modified Solaris distro and an e-bay employee downloaded it and installed it. But is was a version of Solaris, right? Even though this wouldn't have been their fault, Sun would still get killed in the press.
All the Linux support people run into the same issues. RH can't support Slackware because they don't have the time or money to figure out what somebody else did to Linux. They only know what they did to it.
I suspect that not to far down the line, Sun will give the Linux Java market to IBM. They will push it on Solaris to help sell hardware and push it on Windows to help make licensing money but why would they spend time and money on Linux? Linux developers will not pay their software fees, nor are they likely to buy Sun hardware. This seems similar to Microsofts ignoring the Linux market for its software. I understand not bothering with Office but they are not even bothering with their Server software products. Why not? They see themselves as a Linux competitor. They only came back to supporting the Mac when they purchased a big chunck of the company. It seems that Sun still sees itself as a Linux competitor in the operating systems market. IBM seems to be embracing Linux and perhaps hopes to become a real player in this market. They seem to understand that it doesn't matter if every computing device on the planet is running Linux... as long as it is on IBM hardware running IBM solutions. I wouldn't be surprised if Big Blue purchased or partnered with a Linux seller and started making an adjusted Linux to replace or be offered instead of AIX, like SGI seems to be doing with Irix. They could shift the money earned from AIX software fees to the hardware cost and Linux support contracts and switch from AIX development on their own to Linux development with a million of their best friends. They are such good friends they work for free! I have no idea why Sun can not see this as IBM (and SGI) can. I don't know why they don't just take a quiet "what and see" stance like HP. Maybe it's because they are really so cocky that they can't fathom Linux ever catching up to Solaris. Pretty soon people will be complaining about the cost of Solaris when buying a Sun box when they are not intending on using it. Meanwhile, friendly sharing between IBM, SGI, and the Linux community will let IBM and SGI concentrate on hardware. This is where they really make money anyway (compared to software fees).
When Unix fragmented the situation was very different from today's Linux vendors. Back then software was just a means to make hardware do enough so that you could sell it (and services for it) for a lot of money. In that vain each company needed an OS that could take full advantage of their paticular hardware needs. At the same time they had spent a lot of time and money developing this hardware. They couldn't share their OS code without giving away bits of information about their hardware. Today, the tide has shifted. Linux vendors use hardware as just a means to run the software well enough so that they can sell it (and services for it) for a lot of money. They don't have a need or desire to change the guts of Linux. Sure the outsides are changed but that is true of other very successful software products as well. Windows comes in many forms, including versions "adjusted" for certain hardware vendors. There are applications that run on Win9x that do not run on Win3.1, apps that run on WinNT that do not work anywhere else, and apps that run on Win9x that do not run anywhere else. Heck, there are applications that seem to only run on specific versions of Win9x! Has this hurt the market share Windows has enjoyed? Nope. Finally, if the fragmentation of Unix was so bad...why are all these versions of Unix still alive and kicking? The only reason Irix is fading out is because SGI is in trouble, and that is not even from Irix problems. Sun's Solaris, HP's HPUX, IBM's AIX, and Compaq's True64 (the OS formally known as Digital Equipment Corporation's Digital Unix) are all still around and not going anywhere soon. All the companies still make money off of them and the hardware they run on. Fragmentation didn't kill them. Unix is not dead. Unix is alive, kicking, and profitable. So relax; there is nothing to worry about.
It's funny how quick MS is to want open standards when they are losing a battle. This reminds me of the whole instant message war. MS, like Sun, AOL, AT&T, and others, want to control the way things are done. From the language we code in (Sun's Java) to the environment we develop for (MS's Win32 API), to the way we communicate (Instant Messeges) to how are data is transfered (AT&T's Cable Lines). MS proved a long time ago how powerful and profitable this control can be and everyone knows it. This leads to the companies that do not have the control screaming for open standards while they quietly protect the proprietary monopolies that they do have.
This is yet another example of how MS has become too big and does need some form of government control put on them. They have so much money they can buy any new technology, give away things to kill competitors that need to make money off of them, pay for good press about them, pay for bad press about their competitors, etc. As for Gartner...it is scary to think that so many people respect a company that has proven itself to be up for sale. What we really need is a company like Consumer Reports who doesn't except any money from any companies. They are not perfect but they are much better then the average product reviewer. We need someone that can be held up to a higher standard than that of today's press. It is so important to have the people who report news to the public (from your local news to a computer software review) only care about giving the masses the truth. A free and honest press is integral to a free society. It's sad that all to often reporting is about money and not about truth.
Does anyone out there have any ideas to solve this problem? If not for all reporting, at least for reporting on computing? This is an area where having an honest press is especially important because the average people in the public do not have extensive knowledge of the subject matter. They can not distinguish the diffences between the truth, the myth, and the out right lie.
Not everyone is an open source hacker. Many of us have jobs at corporations that say no when we ask about porting drivers to Linux because they feel there isn't enough documentation and that it would cost too much money. Your comment about not having information on hardware doesn't make any sense here. Writing device drivers doesn't have to be hard. Saying that it does is giving up. Writing an OS from scratch is hard but Linus had his Operating Systems book with all the Minux source and information. I used that book for my operating systems class and it is pretty long but I bet Linus was thankful for it (I know I was). Making things easier is a good thing. You shouldn't have to be a master hacker to write a device driver. You shouldn't have to work from scratch after someone else already figured it out. The easier it is to write software for Linux the higher the quantity and the quality of Linux software will be.
Binary only does not automatically mean buggy code. Not everything that comes our of a for profit, non-open source business is crap. Yes, it means you can't see the code and fix it yourself. By the same token, the consumer is all powerful. Don't use it if it doesn't work. Tell the manufacturer. Most companies try to fix problems with their code because they want to keep you as customers. MS is one of the few companies that is so powerful that they can afford to ignore bugs in their code. They are the minority, though. Most companies that make buggy code and never fix it go out of business. Excepting binary only programs and drivers will allow companies that would normally not provide Linux software into it. I know the lack of binary only exceptance is a big reason why many firms don't get into porting their code to Linux. They think that they have to publish the source and they really can't. So you can't use their really cool scanner under Linux. I think that the more support we have, the better.
As someone who is working on device drivers under NT and will be soon porting them to Linux, I agree with the first post. More documentation is needed. Your response of, "If you can't hack at it and make it work, you shouldn't be doing it!" is absurd. If someone spends hours figuring out how to do something they should tell everybody so others do not have to go through the agony. That is the responsible and friendly thing to do. Teamwork and collaboration make development go faster and are big part of the reason Open Source Software is moving up in the world. With your type of attitude no one would no Linux but Linus and few others. Do you think that Donald Becker doesn't help out people trying to write NIC drivers? I can't imagine him saying, "Go figure it yourself and if you can't you shouldn't be doing it."
As for a big book....most programmers I know love having a big fat reference manual. You don't read them, you search for what you need when you need it. The i2o spec is massive but I couldn't get anything working without it.
I don't like MS but by publishing a lot of information on their APIs they make it easy for developers to write for them. This attracts business and other users.
Re:Where is the syntax highlighting?
on
SGI Releases IDE
·
· Score: 1
Cool! To be honest, I checked out the site pretty quickly when this link was posted and based a lot on the screen shot. You might want to update it and add more to really show what it can do. For those of us still at modem speed downloading everything to test it out can really suck up what little bandwidth we have. I'll send you a features list as soon as I get a chance to review it (probably over the weekend).
Where is the syntax highlighting?
on
SGI Releases IDE
·
· Score: 1
Why is this forgotten by almost every IDE wannbe? This really helps me when I am staring at thousands of lines of code.
It looks pretty but can it match Xemacs? It doesn't look like it. Someone should draw up a list of required features for an IDE and send it to these guys (and all the other IDE makers out there). We need it all!
What about using reserved IPs and proxies?
on
CNN On IPv6
·
· Score: 1
I don't understand why each device needs a full IP. At my house I have one dial-up connection that is shared by all my boxes. The IP changes each time I connect. I use a reserved IP space for my local network. Why wouldn't other devices work this way? Perhaps there are a few applications where it wouldn't work but for most of the little devices that people are worrying about, this type of network makes sense.
From what I have read about McNealy, he would love to be as powerful as Bill G. He would love to be powerful enough to do what Gates does. His biggest push (once you get past the "Gates is the devil, go team, go!" speech) has not been that what MS is doing is not a bad or evil thing but a business thing. He feels that there is nothing wrong with these business things when they are done by the little guys but Microsoft is one of the very big guys. There should be laws to regulate a big guy like MS and protect the little guys. He wishes he was in a position where his company needed to be regulated like MS does.
I think that Sun wants to make loads of money by ruling the world just like MS does and like IBM did. They are just attacking it from the hardware side and not the software side. IBM was pretty successful for a time with this strategy. Sun thinks they can be too.
Microsoft is doing what Sun wants to do. I disagree with their tactics on a philosophical level but I have to really applaud MS on a business level. If I owned stock, I would love them. On a philosophical level you want a friendly company but sadly on a business level...these companies rarely make it.
I agree with you but don't think it will happen. They should support the JDK on Linux but the don't have to. They do have to support it on Windows and Solaris, though. Until big companies start staying, "If I don't have Linux Java, I am not using Java," Sun doesn't have to support Linux Java. This is the same issue with getting other companies to port their software to Linux. I know, many database vendors ported to Linux and they did not have to. They did it in order to cover themselves if Linux really took off and because it was good press. Sun could follow that thinking except that database vendors don't sell a competing product to Linux and Sun does. Of course SGI does (or did...) sell a competing product and they are embracing Linux. Again there are major differences. SGI is in trouble and laying off workers. The are scrapping IRIX because it cost them too much money to maintain. Meanwhile Sun is making money and growing at 20% a year or so. Solaris still has major features that make it needed to sell their big iron machines that happen to also be their biggest profit margin machines. Expecting Sun to support Java on Linux is like expecting Microsoft to support Active-X on Linux. It isn't going to happen.
Your probably right. They could also get all the major daemons running and use it as a claim that Unix applications are slower then Win32 applications. As stupid as that sounds to you and me, I am sure some magazine would publish a Microsoft study "proving" it. It continues a classic Microsoft move of providing crippled compatibility. There is no way that SendMail under Interix will beat Exchange. Maybe it did before but now MS can make sure that it doesn't. It reminds me of Dr. DOS, Lotus, WordPerfect, QuickTime, RealVideo, etc. They all complained of this type of underhandedness. It's like a car dealer designing a car that will not run as well with someone elses parts. I still worry about Microsoft getting into the Linux distro business!
Corel is suppossed to be working on enhancing WINE a lot. I haven't heard much about specifics but they claimed that WINE was a central part of getting all of WordPefect Office to run under Linux. Perhaps with all their new found cash RedHat could put some serious labor on the WINE project.
RedHat's Market Capitalization is about 7.383 billion according to Yahoo. Microsoft's is about 497.9 billion and they have lots of money in the bank. Heck, Bill could buy it on his own! Seriously, I think that this should be noted in this anti-trust stuff. One of Sun CEO, Scott McNealy's biggest complaints is Microsoft's buying power. Then can buy anybody and anything. How can you compete with that? Linux starts to get their attention so they buy Unix on Windows company. Like that, no sweat. They are way too powerfull and they need to be regulated by the government in some way.
Well, at least they didn't buy RedHat! This could become pretty bad, though. Microsoft has always been pretty good at the eliminating reasons not to switch to their software buy being very compatible and being (on the surface) good imitators. Look at Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect. Crushed and practically dead. Now they can say: "Buy Win2k, 100% Unix Compatible!" Doesn't the sale have to be approved by the SEC and FTC? Or is that only for big mergers/buyouts? Anyone know the rules for this?
Slashdot Mirror
Check the stock price...MS is going where that stock is going so until it heads south they are not in trouble. MS is a corporation where general public opinion doesn't matter that much and technical opinion matters even less. What really effects their bottom line is corporate and financial market optinion. They don't seem to even see the cracks in the empire yet. Heck, I bet that all the pundits predicting their demise are buying stock right now.
All things do come to an end but I don't think that MS is going anywhere soon. There is still one tactic that they have not tried yet: making high quality, inexpensive software. MS could do it. They do have a lot of smart people working there. Their products lack quality often due to unreasonable deadlines and impossible requirements. I don't blame the programmers. I blame the managers and higher ups.
What if MS decided to give all those softies a chance to do things right?
MS has had several class action suites placed against it for not delivering what their software promises. Also, they have been sued for charging to fix things that were advertised to work in the first place. All of these things were either lost in appeals court or settled out of court. Either way, MS payed money from their unlimited supply to get out of it. Luckily they can not (legally) offer money to the Doj but there are those appeals...
Companies have been sued for making faulty products before and have lost even with "iron" contracts that are supposed to protect them. MS could be next. The trial and findings of fact may open the flood gates.
Wouldn't it great if companies were required by law to make software that works?
This seems to be the case with much of the PC world. The best marketed software because the most popular and it feeds on itself. This "network" effect is very powerful. Although I consider Linux to be of high quality some of its current success comes from quantity. At my old university I saw lots of CS student installing Linux. This sounds great but I was a bit disheartened when I realized that many of them were just trying it because all the other CS people were using it. I would rather Linux win than lose but if I could choose I would rather it win by quality than quantity.
Even after their fantastic IPO, RedHat is still nothing compared to MS. They could buy every single distributer of Linux and then stop pushing it out. I don't think that they could kill Linux but they could really slow down its growth or weaken it. They have nearly unlimited resources and have shown repeatedly that they are willing to use them.
This is why the trial is so important. If this trial fails, MS will come lash out at Linux and all of Microsoft's competitors with a vengence. MS will try to force the OEMs to go back to only MS software. Their power, if unrestrained, is absolute. Absolute power corrupts absolutly so they need to be restrained.
Let's hope that they are not above the law.
Micro$oft is at it again. Buying and controlling everything in site. The techno-entroprenour's dream used to be to unseat microsoft from power. Now it is to be purchased by them. Depressing. Sure, in this case MS did not buy them. They only used their money to control them. "Be nice to MS and we will give you the world...otherwise we will crush you!"
I hope that they keep this kind of thing up because I think that their arrogance will prove to be their undoing. You can only thumb your nose at the law for so long before the law has enough. This will not be like the IBM case. MS seems to really believe that they are right. If they are right, why should they change (or at least soften) their business practices? The day of the big announcement of Findings of Fact also came an investment in Telligent by MS. Then came Hoshin GigaMedia Centre and RadioShack. It will be interesting to see how they try to appeal the judge's Findings of Fact in court while proving them in their business practices.
What do you all think? Will these type of actions affect their appeal process?
Is it possible that Linux, the Open Source Movement, and the Internet could change a country? I hope that China opens up more but I worry about the government's tight control over ISPs and general information exchange. I think it is great that Linux is alive and well in China and all over the world but I wonder what it will take for more than just the source to be open in China? A free and open exchange of information is one of the most important freemdoms that every man, women, and child should have. These are the ideas that helped make Linux what it is today and allow sites like /. to host all the peoples opinions, not just the privileged few. What can those of us that have this freedom do to help those that do not?
Good luck to all those fighting the good fight over in China and everywhere else!
Most people that work on Internet related projects do it because they like it. Sure, their are other issues, but if you look at very smart people, they tend to work exactly where they want to because they can. This leads one to think that rather then stealing a mind away from another industry, the internet has allowed a mind to work where it is happiest and thus most productive.
You could have everyone in the world work on a cure for cancer. If you did I am sure a cure would be found much faster but at the same time the world would starve without food, freeze without power and in general fall apart. Lots of people would be working on a good thing but doing it very badly because they are don't like being a researcher. FED chief Allen Greenspan has been sited as saying that increased productivity of the american worker, especially in the technology industry, is one of the biggest reasons for our boom. People are most productive when they are happy. Smart people that are making a lot of money with internet companies are working where they are most productive. 100 years ago they might not be there. I am programmer. It is what I eat, sleep, and drink (to borrow from my company's ads). 100 years ago, I would have been doing something else but I know that I wouldn't have as productive because I wouldn't have been as happy doing anything else as I am programming today.
There is no shortage of workers in other fields because too many "smart people" are going into the internet. To be honest, the opposite is true. Not enough very smart people are geting involved with the internet and the tech. industry in general. Companies are begging the government to raise immigration limits so that more IT people from other countries can help meet the demand. The demand is so high their are too many people in the IT industry that are not smart enough. Their are tons of people who never studied comp. sci. or EE in college working on important things in the industry. This opens the door for lots of buggy software and hardware and less productivity for people that use this technology. In the old days only a few elite people wrote a program or maintained a server. Now anyone that can run the Visual C++ tutorial writes applications. Anyone that can access the Windows NT Help runs a server. My mother's firm used the head of their accounting department because, "he seems pretty good with computers."
Further proof of this opposite effect is the male to female ratio in most tech. jobs and in EE and comp sci. university classes. It is horrible. Millions of very smart women are not going into this industry and I feel it is for the wrong reasons. I do not believe it is because all of them just don't like it. Many are not exposed to it or are pushed away from it. This theme extends to math and science in general. It is still a widely believed but unproven thought that women are not as good in math and science as men. Garbage! It is a fact that statistics show men are called on far more often then women in math and science classrooms. This is a very real problem!
It is very easy to misinterpret empirical evidence. What the evidence doesn't show is why the decrease occurs. Our society is far less respectiful of our elders than many others in the world. The job market (especially the computer industry) pushes them out. TV doesn't seems not to have shows with anyone over 25 that isn't the parent of a leading character. This kind of attitude doesn't help someone older feel smart or flexible.
What is really strange to think is that our country is run by people much older than this hip teens to twenties age group. If people get older and lose mental faculties than how can you explain some of the senior cititzens in the senate that still have all their marbles.
What about the FED? Allen Greenspan is a genius. He is able to understand a large interconnected world macro economy better than anyone. He has helped creat the longest time or prosperity that this nation has seen in quite awhile. He is losing fluid intelligence? Lord, I hope not! I know a couple of people that work in the New York office and they say that Greenspan is as sharp as ever.
Then comes industry. Forget the new "billionaire before thrity" thing that Bill Gates started. Most CEOs of big successful companies are older people. How can you explain this?
If you are right then we have a lot to worry about when it comes to voting. As you go up in age group the percentage of registered voters that actually go vote increases. Older people are a powerful voting block that always gets out. Meanwhile the youth of this coutry wine about needing internet voting to make it easier. If grandpa can walk there on his walker, then we should be out there.
It comes down to what individuals do. My mother is a 50 something accountant. She has done accounting for years and spent most of the last 15 with the same company using the same software. She has gotten a bit set in her ways. It is no surprise that when her boss left and she assumed some of his duties including handling investments and some system administration, she was a bit worried. She panicked a few times but now she is getting the hang of it. She learned it faster than a lot of the kids in my CS and Finance classes in college.
Speaking of college, how come adults who go back to school do routinly better on average than their younger "smarter" counterparts?
It is not that people lose the ability to learn, it's just that they get out of the habit and get into the habit of doing the same thing every day. All changes create stress, even good things like learning something new. As people get older they learn to avoid stress. This normaly healthy reaction can have very unhealthy results as older people start to fear learning new things. People that have not been burned by stress as much do not have as much fear of new things. This is why some older people will not touch a computer, while others run their own irc chat group.
"This shows that the only reason Sun is opening up their source for any reason is so that they can get developers to fix their code, without really having to pay them."
I don't think so. I agree that Sun has tried to get some "open source" press through this agreement but I don't feel they really expect to get major help from the outside. They are not cutting down their OS programming force. Look at Mozilla; a lot of people have contributed but the bulk of the work has been done by Netscape (now AOL) people. Even with Linux, the bulk of the work is done by a relativly small group of people. At least Sun is a step ahead of MS. MS publishes some of their APIs but does not let you see source or even explain how they are implemented. Half of their APIs are barely even documented at all.
No can really expect Sun to embrace Linux until Linux really catches up in high level scalability on Sparc based systems. Sun's whole reason for Solaris is to sell hardware. They use the same model that has been around forever. They don't want people using Linux because they are either using it on non-Sun hardware (bad for them) or using it on Sun hardware but not paying for support/services from Sun (bad for them again). Sun doesn't want the low end market. They want to make sure that people don't start thinking that Linux on a dual PIII can run the same enterprise system that a big fact mutliprocessor Ultra Sparc can do.
Sort of open or sort of closed, Sun just can't win. If you used Solaris and you found a bug but you couldn't track it down and fix it yourself, you would be angry at them. If you could check the source and fix it and get it into the next gen, you still wouldn't be happy because you did work for a corporation for free whiel they make money off of it. If they switched to Linux and used the GPL, Sun would have to spend a lot of time and money putting in all the high performance features they already have in Solaris (retro fitting an OS is not fun!). And then give it away. There is a big difference between somebody devoting their personal time to an Open Source project and a company devoting lots of money to an open source project. "Fellow board members...I propose a project that will make us zero dollors in new revenue and cost hundreds of man hours but will really boost our reputation with young programmers! And it's the right thing to do!" They could save the money by switching to Linux and waiting for a group they have no control over (the Linux Kernel gang) to get the features in while their OS performance and thus their hardware worth drops. They lose again.
What do you expect? Sun is a corporation! They pay their programmers lots of money. It is a pretty good idea for them to take come control over what they make since they have to support it and it carries their name on it. If they just plain opened up everything they risk really bad versions of what was their stuff getting out and causing big problems. Imagine the E-bay disaster only this time the change that causes the crash was made by some random guy on the net with his own modified Solaris distro and an e-bay employee downloaded it and installed it. But is was a version of Solaris, right? Even though this wouldn't have been their fault, Sun would still get killed in the press.
All the Linux support people run into the same issues. RH can't support Slackware because they don't have the time or money to figure out what somebody else did to Linux. They only know what they did to it.
I suspect that not to far down the line, Sun will give the Linux Java market to IBM. They will push it on Solaris to help sell hardware and push it on Windows to help make licensing money but why would they spend time and money on Linux? Linux developers will not pay their software fees, nor are they likely to buy Sun hardware. This seems similar to Microsofts ignoring the Linux market for its software. I understand not bothering with Office but they are not even bothering with their Server software products. Why not? They see themselves as a Linux competitor. They only came back to supporting the Mac when they purchased a big chunck of the company. It seems that Sun still sees itself as a Linux competitor in the operating systems market.
IBM seems to be embracing Linux and perhaps hopes to become a real player in this market. They seem to understand that it doesn't matter if every computing device on the planet is running Linux... as long as it is on IBM hardware running IBM solutions. I wouldn't be surprised if Big Blue purchased or partnered with a Linux seller and started making an adjusted Linux to replace or be offered instead of AIX, like SGI seems to be doing with Irix. They could shift the money earned from AIX software fees to the hardware cost and Linux support contracts and switch from AIX development on their own to Linux development with a million of their best friends. They are such good friends they work for free! I have no idea why Sun can not see this as IBM (and SGI) can. I don't know why they don't just take a quiet "what and see" stance like HP. Maybe it's because they are really so cocky that they can't fathom Linux ever catching up to Solaris. Pretty soon people will be complaining about the cost of Solaris when buying a Sun box when they are not intending on using it. Meanwhile, friendly sharing between IBM, SGI, and the Linux community will let IBM and SGI concentrate on hardware. This is where they really make money anyway (compared to software fees).
When Unix fragmented the situation was very different from today's Linux vendors. Back then software was just a means to make hardware do enough so that you could sell it (and services for it) for a lot of money. In that vain each company needed an OS that could take full advantage of their paticular hardware needs. At the same time they had spent a lot of time and money developing this hardware. They couldn't share their OS code without giving away bits of information about their hardware.
Today, the tide has shifted. Linux vendors use hardware as just a means to run the software well enough so that they can sell it (and services for it) for a lot of money. They don't have a need or desire to change the guts of Linux. Sure the outsides are changed but that is true of other very successful software products as well. Windows comes in many forms, including versions "adjusted" for certain hardware vendors. There are applications that run on Win9x that do not run on Win3.1, apps that run on WinNT that do not work anywhere else, and apps that run on Win9x that do not run anywhere else. Heck, there are applications that seem to only run on specific versions of Win9x! Has this hurt the market share Windows has enjoyed? Nope.
Finally, if the fragmentation of Unix was so bad...why are all these versions of Unix still alive and kicking? The only reason Irix is fading out is because SGI is in trouble, and that is not even from Irix problems. Sun's Solaris, HP's HPUX, IBM's AIX, and Compaq's True64 (the OS formally known as Digital Equipment Corporation's Digital Unix) are all still around and not going anywhere soon. All the companies still make money off of them and the hardware they run on. Fragmentation didn't kill them. Unix is not dead. Unix is alive, kicking, and profitable.
So relax; there is nothing to worry about.
It's funny how quick MS is to want open standards when they are losing a battle. This reminds me of the whole instant message war. MS, like Sun, AOL, AT&T, and others, want to control the way things are done. From the language we code in (Sun's Java) to the environment we develop for (MS's Win32 API), to the way we communicate (Instant Messeges) to how are data is transfered (AT&T's Cable Lines). MS proved a long time ago how powerful and profitable this control can be and everyone knows it. This leads to the companies that do not have the control screaming for open standards while they quietly protect the proprietary monopolies that they do have.
This is yet another example of how MS has become too big and does need some form of government control put on them. They have so much money they can buy any new technology, give away things to kill competitors that need to make money off of them, pay for good press about them, pay for bad press about their competitors, etc. As for Gartner...it is scary to think that so many people respect a company that has proven itself to be up for sale. What we really need is a company like Consumer Reports who doesn't except any money from any companies. They are not perfect but they are much better then the average product reviewer. We need someone that can be held up to a higher standard than that of today's press. It is so important to have the people who report news to the public (from your local news to a computer software review) only care about giving the masses the truth. A free and honest press is integral to a free society. It's sad that all to often reporting is about money and not about truth.
Does anyone out there have any ideas to solve this problem? If not for all reporting, at least for reporting on computing? This is an area where having an honest press is especially important because the average people in the public do not have extensive knowledge of the subject matter. They can not distinguish the diffences between the truth, the myth, and the out right lie.
Not everyone is an open source hacker. Many of us have jobs at corporations that say no when we ask about porting drivers to Linux because they feel there isn't enough documentation and that it would cost too much money. Your comment about not having information on hardware doesn't make any sense here. Writing device drivers doesn't have to be hard. Saying that it does is giving up. Writing an OS from scratch is hard but Linus had his Operating Systems book with all the Minux source and information. I used that book for my operating systems class and it is pretty long but I bet Linus was thankful for it (I know I was). Making things easier is a good thing. You shouldn't have to be a master hacker to write a device driver. You shouldn't have to work from scratch after someone else already figured it out. The easier it is to write software for Linux the higher the quantity and the quality of Linux software will be.
Binary only does not automatically mean buggy code. Not everything that comes our of a for profit, non-open source business is crap. Yes, it means you can't see the code and fix it yourself. By the same token, the consumer is all powerful. Don't use it if it doesn't work. Tell the manufacturer. Most companies try to fix problems with their code because they want to keep you as customers. MS is one of the few companies that is so powerful that they can afford to ignore bugs in their code. They are the minority, though. Most companies that make buggy code and never fix it go out of business.
Excepting binary only programs and drivers will allow companies that would normally not provide Linux software into it. I know the lack of binary only exceptance is a big reason why many firms don't get into porting their code to Linux. They think that they have to publish the source and they really can't. So you can't use their really cool scanner under Linux. I think that the more support we have, the better.
As someone who is working on device drivers under NT and will be soon porting them to Linux, I agree with the first post. More documentation is needed. Your response of, "If you can't hack at it and make it work, you shouldn't be doing it!" is absurd. If someone spends hours figuring out how to do something they should tell everybody so others do not have to go through the agony. That is the responsible and friendly thing to do. Teamwork and collaboration make development go faster and are big part of the reason Open Source Software is moving up in the world. With your type of attitude no one would no Linux but Linus and few others. Do you think that Donald Becker doesn't help out people trying to write NIC drivers? I can't imagine him saying, "Go figure it yourself and if you can't you shouldn't be doing it."
As for a big book....most programmers I know love having a big fat reference manual. You don't read them, you search for what you need when you need it. The i2o spec is massive but I couldn't get anything working without it.
I don't like MS but by publishing a lot of information on their APIs they make it easy for developers to write for them. This attracts business and other users.
Cool! To be honest, I checked out the site pretty quickly when this link was posted and based a lot on the screen shot. You might want to update it and add more to really show what it can do. For those of us still at modem speed downloading everything to test it out can really suck up what little bandwidth we have. I'll send you a features list as soon as I get a chance to review it (probably over the weekend).
Why is this forgotten by almost every IDE wannbe? This really helps me when I am staring at thousands of lines of code.
It looks pretty but can it match Xemacs? It doesn't look like it. Someone should draw up a list of required features for an IDE and send it to these guys (and all the other IDE makers out there). We need it all!
I don't understand why each device needs a full IP. At my house I have one dial-up connection that is shared by all my boxes. The IP changes each time I connect. I use a reserved IP space for my local network. Why wouldn't other devices work this way? Perhaps there are a few applications where it wouldn't work but for most of the little devices that people are worrying about, this type of network makes sense.
From what I have read about McNealy, he would love to be as powerful as Bill G. He would love to be powerful enough to do what Gates does. His biggest push (once you get past the "Gates is the devil, go team, go!" speech) has not been that what MS is doing is not a bad or evil thing but a business thing. He feels that there is nothing wrong with these business things when they are done by the little guys but Microsoft is one of the very big guys. There should be laws to regulate a big guy like MS and protect the little guys. He wishes he was in a position where his company needed to be regulated like MS does.
I think that Sun wants to make loads of money by ruling the world just like MS does and like IBM did. They are just attacking it from the hardware side and not the software side. IBM was pretty successful for a time with this strategy. Sun thinks they can be too.
Microsoft is doing what Sun wants to do. I disagree with their tactics on a philosophical level but I have to really applaud MS on a business level. If I owned stock, I would love them. On a philosophical level you want a friendly company but sadly on a business level...these companies rarely make it.
I agree with you but don't think it will happen. They should support the JDK on Linux but the don't have to. They do have to support it on Windows and Solaris, though. Until big companies start staying, "If I don't have Linux Java, I am not using Java," Sun doesn't have to support Linux Java. This is the same issue with getting other companies to port their software to Linux.
I know, many database vendors ported to Linux and they did not have to. They did it in order to cover themselves if Linux really took off and because it was good press. Sun could follow that thinking except that database vendors don't sell a competing product to Linux and Sun does.
Of course SGI does (or did...) sell a competing product and they are embracing Linux. Again there are major differences. SGI is in trouble and laying off workers. The are scrapping IRIX because it cost them too much money to maintain. Meanwhile Sun is making money and growing at 20% a year or so. Solaris still has major features that make it needed to sell their big iron machines that happen to also be their biggest profit margin machines.
Expecting Sun to support Java on Linux is like expecting Microsoft to support Active-X on Linux. It isn't going to happen.
Your probably right. They could also get all the major daemons running and use it as a claim that Unix applications are slower then Win32 applications. As stupid as that sounds to you and me, I am sure some magazine would publish a Microsoft study "proving" it. It continues a classic Microsoft move of providing crippled compatibility. There is no way that SendMail under Interix will beat Exchange. Maybe it did before but now MS can make sure that it doesn't. It reminds me of Dr. DOS, Lotus, WordPerfect, QuickTime, RealVideo, etc. They all complained of this type of underhandedness. It's like a car dealer designing a car that will not run as well with someone elses parts.
I still worry about Microsoft getting into the Linux distro business!
Corel is suppossed to be working on enhancing WINE a lot. I haven't heard much about specifics but they claimed that WINE was a central part of getting all of WordPefect Office to run under Linux.
Perhaps with all their new found cash RedHat could put some serious labor on the WINE project.
RedHat's Market Capitalization is about 7.383 billion according to Yahoo. Microsoft's is about 497.9 billion and they have lots of money in the bank. Heck, Bill could buy it on his own!
Seriously, I think that this should be noted in this anti-trust stuff. One of Sun CEO, Scott McNealy's biggest complaints is Microsoft's buying power. Then can buy anybody and anything. How can you compete with that? Linux starts to get their attention so they buy Unix on Windows company. Like that, no sweat. They are way too powerfull and they need to be regulated by the government in some way.
Well, at least they didn't buy RedHat!
This could become pretty bad, though. Microsoft has always been pretty good at the eliminating reasons not to switch to their software buy being very compatible and being (on the surface) good imitators. Look at Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect. Crushed and practically dead. Now they can say: "Buy Win2k, 100% Unix Compatible!" Doesn't the sale have to be approved by the SEC and FTC? Or is that only for big mergers/buyouts? Anyone know the rules for this?