I was looking at a junior high science book recently. Everything seemed very dumbed down already.
I'm going to go out on a limb and assume that you're either in college or a college grad...
...in which case, finding a junior high textbook "dumbed down" really doesn't mean that (a) it's below par or (b) that you're a supergenious.
There are some disciplines where you have to walk before you crawl -- for example, aren't Newton's Laws just a dumbed-down version of Einstein? Yet we teach them because they work pretty well and they're far more approachible for beginners.
No offense, but if your kid can't write or read very well by the third grade, isn't that mostly your fault?
You obviously didn't glance at the article or anything, 'cause if you had you'd probably understand that the idea is to overhaul these books which were essentially designed Way Back When (and subsequently only updated) to reflect a more modern understanding of how to effectively impart information to children -- we know that they don't learn like adults do, so it's backwards to use instruments which assume that they do.
For example: It's hard to dispute that kids or a certain age absorb more from a narrative than from being presented with a list of facts to absorb. So, what possible objection could you have to using a narrative to impart these lessons? When your kid was learning the alphabet, didn't you teach her the song version? Or did you insist that the A-B-C song is a lightweight new-agey tool for stupid children and force her to recite it without singing? No ROY G BIV or other memory aids for her, no sir....
Anyhow, if there's a better way to impart information, I'm all for it. If you're not, well, you're an idiot. And read the fucking article next time.
For all of you who weren't lucky enough to look at/. at just the right time, I'll FTP copies over to my box at home and into my gnutella directory so you can find 'em there. Much better method of distribution, IMO.
Couple of off-the-top observations (Windows version):
Why the heck can't it handle my skins a little more gracefully? Is having Orbit work between 1.2.1 and 1.3 too much to ask?
Where the heck is the option to stop scripts from opening unrequested windows? Not in Prefs -> Advanced -> Scripts & Plugins anymore... Oh! It's got it's own section in Privacy & Security...
So how will we deal with another society 17,597,088,000,000,000 miles away?
That's a plausable scenario and a good point. A signal lag time which represents most of the whole of human history is obviously not workable, and given the size of the universe (big), it's not hard to see it happening.
But that hardly means such contact could in any way be considered a failure. As I see it, we as a species stand to gain a lot from it:
A data point for the Drake equation. Hey, if *somebody* else is out there and within 3000 light years, there are quite probably a lot of other somebodys out there.
Potential research value. Their science may be more advanced and would certainly be different from our own. We could almost certainly pick up insights into our universe just by interpreting and communications (or, at least, Fox could steal their reality shows and produce them on earth).
Mindset. A lot of the conflict of the last 50 years or so has been centered around the fact that our technology is making the earth "smaller" far faster than our various cultures are able to compensate for. This sort of discovery could give some perspective as to what "us" means, or at the very least drive some competetive juices that drive humans (gotta get to Mars, gotta colonize the Oort belt, gotta get good at this whole space thing...)
Sure, some people'd react badly to it. We'd probably see some mass suicides, maybe a couple of new religious cults, but that'd all encompass people who'd go for that shit anyhow (Tom Cruise, etc). Seems like a fair trade-off to me.
I'm not sure I agree with you 100% on your police work there, Lou.
Firstly, the distance that signals from another potential civilization *could* be enormous, but then again they could be reasonably small. There are a pretty fair number of stars within, oh, 100 light years or so of our own primary. The real question there is what sort of values to plug into the Drake equation, and we won't have a good idea there until we collect some data points.
Secondly, why would you assume that an alien civilization would carefully hide their transmissions? We don't, even though we understand that we're basically advertising the location of our planet with TV and radio and radar. Besides, if you really wanted to mask your location, you'd stick to cable. Sure, we wouldn't pick them up, but for each ultraparanoid civilization (and I'll grant you that they very well may exist), there are probably others less cautious.
Sure, we could be all the life that's out there -- in the absense of any concrete proof, there's always that chance. That said, I personally have a hard time believing that in a universe as big as ours the there's a unique instance of anything. Anyhow, putting in a minimum of effort seems pretty reasonable when you're talking about making the greatest discovery in the history of history, doesn't it?
Oh really? Something like 60% of breaches are internal. What are you going to do now? Put everyone on their own separate network?
To start with, I'd like to see where you got your 60% number.
Obviously you can never have a 100% secure system, but we're doing good stuff above and beyond what's required by HIPAA. Patient data terminals on our new network are located in physically secured rooms (locked) in buildings with human security. The terminals lock after just a couple minutes of idle time, and require a SecureID to log into. We couldn't afford to add physical protection inside the walls for the wires (metal pipes with pressure detectors work well but are expensive), so all data traffic is VPNed. The physical machine cases are locked and alarmed, and the BIOS will commit hari kari if they're improperly opened.
The people with access to the system are given a week of training and sign documents detailing what'll happen to them if they cause a security breach.
Is it perfect? Of course not -- I can think of a dozen ways to access it given proper time, resources and motivation. Is it a zillion times more secure than having a Win2k system sitting on the internet? You bet your ass.
Am I the only one who thinks that there should be penalties for the hack-ee when private information is stolen?
Not to adapt a blame-the-victim mindset, but I mean really, why is this stuff on an internet-connected machine to begin with? I work in health care, and with HIPAA coming into effect, we've been moving a substantial part of our network off the internet -- if there's no physical connection, we can't get hacked.
This stuff needs to be taken seriously, and not just in punishing the offenders. Look at it this way: If your bank got robbed tomorrow and all the items in your safe deposit box were made off with, would you blame the bank if you found out that the vault was left open and the deposit boxes were made of cardboard? I sure would.
I read that book. The cable causes a serious catastrophe as it falls, basically nuking out the equator of the planet.
The sort of cable (ribbon) mentioned here wouldn't be heavy (in mass to area terms) enough to cause this sort of damage. The parts that didn't burn up on reentry would be slowed by the atmosphere.
I've got to admit that your post read like flamebait at first, but...
The way the Iraqi situation (and, in some ways, the larger west vs. Islam conflict) is being framed in simplistic good vs. evil terms by our leaders is disturbing because it takes complicated issues and reduces them to trite overgeneralizations. LoTR's overall commercial success can be viewed as an example of this.
There's no doubt that war fantasy takes some account for this; forget Tolken for the moment and consider Tom Clancy -- noble, professional US soldiers go out and conquer this evil or that and are back in time for dinner. It, along with fast-and-easy wars like Gulf War I, create this fantasy that the US is completely unbeatible in all environments and an eagerness to go fight rather than exploring other options.
Back to the point though, LoTR demonstrates the basis of this problem: people would rather view their complex world in terms of a neat, all-ends tied up, good vs. evil novel like LoTR. The characters are all very straightforward, and you never have to wonder if Gandalf has ulterier motives. It's a good story, but a dangerous way to view the world for those not sophisticated enough to look past it (not to be pessemistic, but let's face it, Survivor is in it's zillionth rendition).
Anyhow, this is why it's important to push people through to more complex literative and stories where people aren't good or evil, but who work towards their own logical (or not) ends. Maybe this would help increase the sophistication of the general populace and generate an electorate which si less easily lied to, helping to preserve democracy against those who would coopt it.
Playing the bad guys, I assume that's exactly what you'll be doing -- ripping everything to shit. I would expect the environment around the bases of Sauron's forces to blacked and die, like with the creep in Starcraft.
For the good guys.. er, maybe you'll go around begging large amounts of food and supplies of Tom Bombadil, elves and other forces that meander along seemingly at random throughout the game. That would seem to fit the paradigm of the books pretty well...
How much can you really tell from a pre-pre-beta version of the game? At this point, there's still a 50-50 chance we'll never even see this one in production.
Good to know it's (maybe) coming, though. I wonder how well LoTR will translate to this format -- it is an extremely hero-driven mythos (even beyond the quest of the Ring Bearer), and the avatar/hero units in RTS games I've played previously were rather disappointing when compared with Gandalf or Aragorn.
If Aragorn can't lead an army of the dead, I'll be very disappointed. If they turn Galdalf from subtle mage into just another flashy area-damage unit, I'm tossing the whole affair out the window. That is, of course, assuming it runs well under WineX in the first place...
Thank God that once we beat Iraq we won't have to worry about terrorism anymore.
Seriously, though, doesn't it seem like there's just one security failure after another at these labs recently? I remember after the Wen Ho Lee "incident" they tightened things up to the point where the scientists were complaining, but apparently that was just a temporary thing.
It seems to me that installations which are especially key deserve much closer attention than they seem to get. Why isn't there a national security force staffed by professionals? They could guard non-military installations which have specific value, like nuclear plants, dams and national labs.
Support is important, but it's already available (it you want non-RTFM support, you have to either accept abuse from the usenet folks or pay for it, just like with any other software).
GUI is just a small part of the real battlefield: functionality. Sooner or later, Linux is going to blow past MS in terms of user experience due simply to the fact that they can pick-and-choose which bits to emulate (fast-launching browser in, annoying Clippy and friends out). At that point, it won't matter if MS gives away Windows because nobody'll want it anyhow. The only way they'll survive is if they can consistantly innovate new, useful features at a reasonable price to stay ahead of the curve, something which MS has *never* been able to do.
So, MS will have to flee off the desktop to other things the OSS community doesn't do well -- game development, console systems, etc. There, they'll have to compete in a far more level playing environment and will in the long term probably get their monopolostic asses handed to them by smaller, faster companies.
How can I predict this? Because that's how things work with most industries which don't exist as regulatory monopolies. I don't see software being any different -- in fact, I predict the decline of MS on the desktop will come so quickly that if you blink you'll miss it.
MS is a superpower. If they told everyone they plan on cornering the stock market, and taking over the world, people STILL would be buying their product. Face it people, if there is going to be a change, it will happen slowly.
Nobody stays on top forever. In fact, the really bigdogs who like to abuse their power are the ones who tend to fall apart the fastest.
Microsoft is a big, inflexible company. I'm not saying they're going to go chapter 11 or anything, but I do believe that they might become startlingly irrelevant in a very short amount of time like IBM did in the 80's-90's. Ironically, for IBM, it was an inability to see the OS as the real market; for MS, it'll be an inability to see that the OS is no longer the real market...
The 47-year-old Microsoft chairman has a good idea about when he'll be retiring, he enjoys driving his daughter to school, and he has a home-improvement project he wants to get to one of these days.
By home-improvement, I hope he means replacing that NT cluster he has running everything with a more reliable system. I figure he's got to be sick of getting locked out of the john at 3 AM by a system crash...
It'll be interesting to see what happens to their server business when big blue starts throwing its weight around.
Holy Crap, that's amazing! Those are the *exact* words spoken to be by a friend back in 1986. Of course, he was referring to Microsoft, not Red Hat. Anyhow, I'll bite:
I theorize that support and update services will become more critical to businesses in the future than they are now. Consider this week: There have been several security-oriented updates made available, which I had to deploy to my relatively small group of ten Linux boxes. I was able to complete each update in five minutes because my (very large) company owns subscriptions to the RH Network for each machine. Those subscriptions probably paid for themselves this week, just measured against my time.
Tell me that's a bad way to make money. And, oh yeah, unlike any other Linux company, they are making money. That's damned hard to argue with.
Should Microsoft ever truly respond to the Linux threat, say by slashing their prices of Windows XP/Windows 2003/Windows Whatever in half, and slash the prices of Microsoft Office in half (much as they have already done in a recent promotion for Apple Macintosh users), it's game over for Linux on the desktop. Xandros is $100. LindowsOS is $130. Hardly anyone would be willing to switch to Linux, when for just $20-$50 more, they can buy the latest and greatest version of Windows, and avoid that steep learning curve and lack of "critical applications" that Linux tends to bring.
I think you're completely, 100% wrong.
The only way your logic works is if cost were discouraging people from buying Windows, giving rise to the assumption that the cost of Windows is what's pushing people to Linux. In response to this, I would point out that 99.95% of personal computers sold are done so *with Windows already bought, paid for and installed*.
Besides, pretty much everyone out there operates under the basic assumption that they'll have to pay some money for an OS or Office software. We don't really think about it anymore -- sure, we might bitch when it costs $100 to upgrade to the latest and greatest version, but for most people that's not a deal-breaker.
No, the real battlefield is functionality. Sooner or later, Linux is going to blow past MS in terms of user experience due simply to the fact that they can pick-and-choose which bits to emulate (fast-launching browser in, annoying Clippy and friends out). At that point, it won't matter if MS gives away Windows because nobody'll want it anyhow. The only way they'll survive is if they can consistantly innovate new, useful features at a reasonable price to stay ahead of the curve, something which MS has *never* been able to do.
So, MS will have to flee off the desktop to other things the OSS community doesn't do well -- game development, console systems, etc. There, they'll have to compete in a far more level playing environment and will in the long term probably get their monopolostic asses handed to them by smaller, faster companies.
How can I predict this? Because that's how things work with most industries which don't exist as regulatory monopolies. I don't see software being any different -- in fact, I predict the decline of MS on the desktop will come so quickly that if you blink you'll miss it.
I think that particular error provides you with a fairly accurate yardstick with which to judge the rest of the reporting in the articles.
IMO, you have to be pretty close to any given industry to really understand it and even closer to try and draw conclusions as to what the future looks like. There's no way that you can get that close to more than one or two industries, so turning out an insightful article about a new industry for a magazine each month is a bit of a joke. So, these reporters are left looking at the tea leaves of the businesses they're reporting on -- the profit numbers, the growth rate, etc.
The more important data is beyond their grasp. For instance, I know that the advanced server and subscription update models are good because, even though I'm an old-school linux guy, I use them and find them valuable, esp. if my company's paying for them. I know that when I look on the desktops of the people who are making buying recommendations, I'm seeng Red Hat systems running as desktops. I know that in meetings, we make buying decisions for products based partly on how they support Linux.
None of this is available to these guys, which is why in the long term their advice in this (as well as many other) catagories is essentially worthless -- all they can do is point out the obvious, like "not making phone companies share will hurt DSL companies dependant on that sharing"... Gee, thanks.
Besides, if you knew how to play the market with any great degree of proficiancy, would you waste your time publishing a magazine?
I read over the "Red Flags for Red Hat" article, and I have to confess I found it pretty weak.
The notion that a company which went from a $2m loss to a $300,000 profit, which has a clear majority in terms of install base and which is the only company making money in its segment is headed for trouble seems like seriously flawed thinking to me.
It seems pretty clear to me that Red Hat has the rare gift of competent management. Maybe RH isn't going to see a big pop in the next quarter, but it's hard to see how the "next five years" view isn't looking pretty rosy. I don't see the fact that it's not back to it's stupidly high.com-era stock price as any sort of a reasonable warning sign.
Anyhow, I own a couple thousand dollars worth of RH shares, so maybe I'm just believing what I want to.
I believe that in some countries banks actually install a camera in every ATM they own. They simply take a video or a snapshot of the person making transaction with the machine.
Most ATMs in the US are under video survailance, too.
Of course, this won't prevent me from using a techincal exploit to rob them. All I need to do is find an ATM in a somewhat secluded place (not hard), put on a ski mask just before I go to work and not take it off while I'm robbing the thing blind.
Cameras != protection from crime. They just assist in catching stupid criminals.
I mean, who is stupid enough to make serious investment decisions based on unsolicited email? Is there something I'm missing here? Somebody explain this to me!
wait a minute... i have to take responsibility because the football team stuffed me into a locker?
In the perfect little world, you're right.
In a place I like to call "reality", on the other hand, it's a different matter. If you weren't willing to fight for yourself, you had some responsibility.
"Oh, but I can't win against the whole football team!" Yeah, no shit. But winning isn't the point -- showing them you were willing to stand up for yourself was, even if it meant taking a beating.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm going to go out on a limb and assume that you're either in college or a college grad...
There are some disciplines where you have to walk before you crawl -- for example, aren't Newton's Laws just a dumbed-down version of Einstein? Yet we teach them because they work pretty well and they're far more approachible for beginners.
You obviously didn't glance at the article or anything, 'cause if you had you'd probably understand that the idea is to overhaul these books which were essentially designed Way Back When (and subsequently only updated) to reflect a more modern understanding of how to effectively impart information to children -- we know that they don't learn like adults do, so it's backwards to use instruments which assume that they do.
For example: It's hard to dispute that kids or a certain age absorb more from a narrative than from being presented with a list of facts to absorb. So, what possible objection could you have to using a narrative to impart these lessons? When your kid was learning the alphabet, didn't you teach her the song version? Or did you insist that the A-B-C song is a lightweight new-agey tool for stupid children and force her to recite it without singing? No ROY G BIV or other memory aids for her, no sir....
Anyhow, if there's a better way to impart information, I'm all for it. If you're not, well, you're an idiot. And read the fucking article next time.
Couple of off-the-top observations (Windows version):
Why the heck can't it handle my skins a little more gracefully? Is having Orbit work between 1.2.1 and 1.3 too much to ask?
Where the heck is the option to stop scripts from opening unrequested windows? Not in Prefs -> Advanced -> Scripts & Plugins anymore... Oh! It's got it's own section in Privacy & Security...
Cool.
Yeah! Got the Linux and Windows versions before the Slashdotting! In your face, Taco!
Good stuff, sense of humor.
That's a plausable scenario and a good point. A signal lag time which represents most of the whole of human history is obviously not workable, and given the size of the universe (big), it's not hard to see it happening.
But that hardly means such contact could in any way be considered a failure. As I see it, we as a species stand to gain a lot from it:
A data point for the Drake equation. Hey, if *somebody* else is out there and within 3000 light years, there are quite probably a lot of other somebodys out there.
Potential research value. Their science may be more advanced and would certainly be different from our own. We could almost certainly pick up insights into our universe just by interpreting and communications (or, at least, Fox could steal their reality shows and produce them on earth).
Mindset. A lot of the conflict of the last 50 years or so has been centered around the fact that our technology is making the earth "smaller" far faster than our various cultures are able to compensate for. This sort of discovery could give some perspective as to what "us" means, or at the very least drive some competetive juices that drive humans (gotta get to Mars, gotta colonize the Oort belt, gotta get good at this whole space thing...)
Sure, some people'd react badly to it. We'd probably see some mass suicides, maybe a couple of new religious cults, but that'd all encompass people who'd go for that shit anyhow (Tom Cruise, etc). Seems like a fair trade-off to me.
Firstly, the distance that signals from another potential civilization *could* be enormous, but then again they could be reasonably small. There are a pretty fair number of stars within, oh, 100 light years or so of our own primary. The real question there is what sort of values to plug into the Drake equation, and we won't have a good idea there until we collect some data points.
Secondly, why would you assume that an alien civilization would carefully hide their transmissions? We don't, even though we understand that we're basically advertising the location of our planet with TV and radio and radar. Besides, if you really wanted to mask your location, you'd stick to cable. Sure, we wouldn't pick them up, but for each ultraparanoid civilization (and I'll grant you that they very well may exist), there are probably others less cautious.
Sure, we could be all the life that's out there -- in the absense of any concrete proof, there's always that chance. That said, I personally have a hard time believing that in a universe as big as ours the there's a unique instance of anything. Anyhow, putting in a minimum of effort seems pretty reasonable when you're talking about making the greatest discovery in the history of history, doesn't it?
>I would imagine that under such a system, no organization
> would ever admit to being cracked since they would be financially
> liable.
Easily solved. Introduce a heavy incentive for whistleblowers and dramatic fines for individuals caught trying to cover up any breach.
To start with, I'd like to see where you got your 60% number.
Obviously you can never have a 100% secure system, but we're doing good stuff above and beyond what's required by HIPAA. Patient data terminals on our new network are located in physically secured rooms (locked) in buildings with human security. The terminals lock after just a couple minutes of idle time, and require a SecureID to log into. We couldn't afford to add physical protection inside the walls for the wires (metal pipes with pressure detectors work well but are expensive), so all data traffic is VPNed. The physical machine cases are locked and alarmed, and the BIOS will commit hari kari if they're improperly opened.
The people with access to the system are given a week of training and sign documents detailing what'll happen to them if they cause a security breach.
Is it perfect? Of course not -- I can think of a dozen ways to access it given proper time, resources and motivation. Is it a zillion times more secure than having a Win2k system sitting on the internet? You bet your ass.
Not to adapt a blame-the-victim mindset, but I mean really, why is this stuff on an internet-connected machine to begin with? I work in health care, and with HIPAA coming into effect, we've been moving a substantial part of our network off the internet -- if there's no physical connection, we can't get hacked.
This stuff needs to be taken seriously, and not just in punishing the offenders. Look at it this way: If your bank got robbed tomorrow and all the items in your safe deposit box were made off with, would you blame the bank if you found out that the vault was left open and the deposit boxes were made of cardboard? I sure would.
The sort of cable (ribbon) mentioned here wouldn't be heavy (in mass to area terms) enough to cause this sort of damage. The parts that didn't burn up on reentry would be slowed by the atmosphere.
The way the Iraqi situation (and, in some ways, the larger west vs. Islam conflict) is being framed in simplistic good vs. evil terms by our leaders is disturbing because it takes complicated issues and reduces them to trite overgeneralizations. LoTR's overall commercial success can be viewed as an example of this.
There's no doubt that war fantasy takes some account for this; forget Tolken for the moment and consider Tom Clancy -- noble, professional US soldiers go out and conquer this evil or that and are back in time for dinner. It, along with fast-and-easy wars like Gulf War I, create this fantasy that the US is completely unbeatible in all environments and an eagerness to go fight rather than exploring other options.
Back to the point though, LoTR demonstrates the basis of this problem: people would rather view their complex world in terms of a neat, all-ends tied up, good vs. evil novel like LoTR. The characters are all very straightforward, and you never have to wonder if Gandalf has ulterier motives. It's a good story, but a dangerous way to view the world for those not sophisticated enough to look past it (not to be pessemistic, but let's face it, Survivor is in it's zillionth rendition).
Anyhow, this is why it's important to push people through to more complex literative and stories where people aren't good or evil, but who work towards their own logical (or not) ends. Maybe this would help increase the sophistication of the general populace and generate an electorate which si less easily lied to, helping to preserve democracy against those who would coopt it.
Or maybe I'm just off on a rant.
For the good guys.. er, maybe you'll go around begging large amounts of food and supplies of Tom Bombadil, elves and other forces that meander along seemingly at random throughout the game. That would seem to fit the paradigm of the books pretty well...
Good to know it's (maybe) coming, though. I wonder how well LoTR will translate to this format -- it is an extremely hero-driven mythos (even beyond the quest of the Ring Bearer), and the avatar/hero units in RTS games I've played previously were rather disappointing when compared with Gandalf or Aragorn.
If Aragorn can't lead an army of the dead, I'll be very disappointed. If they turn Galdalf from subtle mage into just another flashy area-damage unit, I'm tossing the whole affair out the window. That is, of course, assuming it runs well under WineX in the first place...
Seriously, though, doesn't it seem like there's just one security failure after another at these labs recently? I remember after the Wen Ho Lee "incident" they tightened things up to the point where the scientists were complaining, but apparently that was just a temporary thing.
It seems to me that installations which are especially key deserve much closer attention than they seem to get. Why isn't there a national security force staffed by professionals? They could guard non-military installations which have specific value, like nuclear plants, dams and national labs.
This is just another example of how nothing's changed since 9-11 except our willingness to give away our rights to those who consider themselves our masters. It's getting depressing to watch as we (the US) waste our time and attention on imaginary or, at best, overinflated threats while doing nothing to focus on our real problems.
GUI is just a small part of the real battlefield: functionality. Sooner or later, Linux is going to blow past MS in terms of user experience due simply to the fact that they can pick-and-choose which bits to emulate (fast-launching browser in, annoying Clippy and friends out). At that point, it won't matter if MS gives away Windows because nobody'll want it anyhow. The only way they'll survive is if they can consistantly innovate new, useful features at a reasonable price to stay ahead of the curve, something which MS has *never* been able to do.
So, MS will have to flee off the desktop to other things the OSS community doesn't do well -- game development, console systems, etc. There, they'll have to compete in a far more level playing environment and will in the long term probably get their monopolostic asses handed to them by smaller, faster companies.
How can I predict this? Because that's how things work with most industries which don't exist as regulatory monopolies. I don't see software being any different -- in fact, I predict the decline of MS on the desktop will come so quickly that if you blink you'll miss it.
Nobody stays on top forever. In fact, the really big dogs who like to abuse their power are the ones who tend to fall apart the fastest.
Microsoft is a big, inflexible company. I'm not saying they're going to go chapter 11 or anything, but I do believe that they might become startlingly irrelevant in a very short amount of time like IBM did in the 80's-90's. Ironically, for IBM, it was an inability to see the OS as the real market; for MS, it'll be an inability to see that the OS is no longer the real market...
By home-improvement, I hope he means replacing that NT cluster he has running everything with a more reliable system. I figure he's got to be sick of getting locked out of the john at 3 AM by a system crash...
Holy Crap, that's amazing! Those are the *exact* words spoken to be by a friend back in 1986. Of course, he was referring to Microsoft, not Red Hat. Anyhow, I'll bite:
I theorize that support and update services will become more critical to businesses in the future than they are now. Consider this week: There have been several security-oriented updates made available, which I had to deploy to my relatively small group of ten Linux boxes. I was able to complete each update in five minutes because my (very large) company owns subscriptions to the RH Network for each machine. Those subscriptions probably paid for themselves this week, just measured against my time.
Tell me that's a bad way to make money. And, oh yeah, unlike any other Linux company, they are making money. That's damned hard to argue with.
I think you're completely, 100% wrong.
The only way your logic works is if cost were discouraging people from buying Windows, giving rise to the assumption that the cost of Windows is what's pushing people to Linux. In response to this, I would point out that 99.95% of personal computers sold are done so *with Windows already bought, paid for and installed*.
Besides, pretty much everyone out there operates under the basic assumption that they'll have to pay some money for an OS or Office software. We don't really think about it anymore -- sure, we might bitch when it costs $100 to upgrade to the latest and greatest version, but for most people that's not a deal-breaker.
No, the real battlefield is functionality. Sooner or later, Linux is going to blow past MS in terms of user experience due simply to the fact that they can pick-and-choose which bits to emulate (fast-launching browser in, annoying Clippy and friends out). At that point, it won't matter if MS gives away Windows because nobody'll want it anyhow. The only way they'll survive is if they can consistantly innovate new, useful features at a reasonable price to stay ahead of the curve, something which MS has *never* been able to do.
So, MS will have to flee off the desktop to other things the OSS community doesn't do well -- game development, console systems, etc. There, they'll have to compete in a far more level playing environment and will in the long term probably get their monopolostic asses handed to them by smaller, faster companies.
How can I predict this? Because that's how things work with most industries which don't exist as regulatory monopolies. I don't see software being any different -- in fact, I predict the decline of MS on the desktop will come so quickly that if you blink you'll miss it.
IMO, you have to be pretty close to any given industry to really understand it and even closer to try and draw conclusions as to what the future looks like. There's no way that you can get that close to more than one or two industries, so turning out an insightful article about a new industry for a magazine each month is a bit of a joke. So, these reporters are left looking at the tea leaves of the businesses they're reporting on -- the profit numbers, the growth rate, etc.
The more important data is beyond their grasp. For instance, I know that the advanced server and subscription update models are good because, even though I'm an old-school linux guy, I use them and find them valuable, esp. if my company's paying for them. I know that when I look on the desktops of the people who are making buying recommendations, I'm seeng Red Hat systems running as desktops. I know that in meetings, we make buying decisions for products based partly on how they support Linux.
None of this is available to these guys, which is why in the long term their advice in this (as well as many other) catagories is essentially worthless -- all they can do is point out the obvious, like "not making phone companies share will hurt DSL companies dependant on that sharing"... Gee, thanks.
Besides, if you knew how to play the market with any great degree of proficiancy, would you waste your time publishing a magazine?
The notion that a company which went from a $2m loss to a $300,000 profit, which has a clear majority in terms of install base and which is the only company making money in its segment is headed for trouble seems like seriously flawed thinking to me.
It seems pretty clear to me that Red Hat has the rare gift of competent management. Maybe RH isn't going to see a big pop in the next quarter, but it's hard to see how the "next five years" view isn't looking pretty rosy. I don't see the fact that it's not back to it's stupidly high .com-era stock price as any sort of a reasonable warning sign.
Anyhow, I own a couple thousand dollars worth of RH shares, so maybe I'm just believing what I want to.
Most ATMs in the US are under video survailance, too.
Of course, this won't prevent me from using a techincal exploit to rob them. All I need to do is find an ATM in a somewhat secluded place (not hard), put on a ski mask just before I go to work and not take it off while I'm robbing the thing blind.
Cameras != protection from crime. They just assist in catching stupid criminals.
I mean, who is stupid enough to make serious investment decisions based on unsolicited email? Is there something I'm missing here? Somebody explain this to me!
In the perfect little world, you're right.
In a place I like to call "reality", on the other hand, it's a different matter. If you weren't willing to fight for yourself, you had some responsibility.
"Oh, but I can't win against the whole football team!" Yeah, no shit. But winning isn't the point -- showing them you were willing to stand up for yourself was, even if it meant taking a beating.
We were all bullied in school. Get over it.