but there is nothing - NOTHING - stopping superior alternatives from being adopted, if they are sufficiently better.
Do you live under a rock? Your statement is not even close to reality. There have been tons of analogies here on/., and the most famous being a car company, so I will use that one.
I own a car company called MS-Cars. MS-Cars makes 96%+ of all the consumer cars driven in the _world_. MS-Cars not only make the cars, we make many of the parts for the cars. MS-Cars has _extensive_ patents on the process of building cars and car parts. MS-Cars also keeps everything proprietary. We don't share with any other company how to install an MS-Seat, MS-Engine, MS-Tire, etc into another car. If you do reverse engineer how to install one of our products in another car, your license is void and you are not entitled to use said product any longer. There are other 3rd party parts out in the market, however since MS-Cars controls 96%+ of all consumer cars, there is not much of a profit motive for 3rd party parts to fit or work with other cars. As MS-Cars enters other markets (MS-Oil), we are able to use our monopoly in consumer cars to "float" our new market attempt until we have been able to leverage our MS-Cars monopoly and create a new monopoly such as with MS-Oil. Our MS-Gas will be proprietary and will only work with MS-Cars. If you get MS-Gas to work with another car, your license to use MS-Gas is terminated.
Now you come along and try to start amliebsch-Cars. However, you soon find that most of the basic concepts of building a car have been patented by MS-Cars. You either have to give up or throw away years of previous industry knowlege and create all new methods taking years and costing a prohibitive amount of money. You find out that none of your customers can use MS-Parts because even if you get them to fit in amliebsch-Cars, the license of MS-Parts forbids it. You also find that there are not many 3rd party after market parts for amliebsch-Cars because they have all been made to only fit MS-Cars. If amliebsch-Cars ever does get some good products out, MS-Cars will probably just come along with our massive amount of monopoly money and buy out amliebsch-Cars so that once again we are the only alternative.
A monopoly is never good for consumers or the industry. Monopolies only help the holder of that monopoly.
Why don't we look at this rationally. The Yankee Group doesn't do "studies" for free. The Yankee Group are a for-profit company. So basically someone paid the Yankee Group to do this "study".
Now, who could it be? Could it be Red Hat, SuSE, IBM or some other pro-Linux company? I have serious doubts about that. What about Microsoft? Well, MS has certainly paid for other "studies" to be done in the past. So I don't think there would be any major reason to not count MS in on this "study". Basically we just need to find out _who_ paid for this "study" to really see where the bias lays.
I remember last year I had a phone call from some unknown company that was doing a "study" about MS. I was asked how I felt about MS as a company. How I felt about the products put out by MS and if I "trusted" MS. As soon as I answered that I "did not trust MS as a company", I was told my "interview" was over and "thank you for your time". So it seems as soon as one of these companies get a negative response about the company that are footing the bill, the interview dies.
Why did you move from Clermont? For a job? I love it out here, though here in central Florida we have our fair share of @ss hole drivers to deal with. I have never been to Texas to compare the two though. I grew up in the north east, about 25 miles out side of Philadelphia. I thought there were @ss holes in Philly, central Florida certainly has more @ss hole drivers IMO.
You do know that the radar guns police use are not perfectly accurate? They can be off by a say 1 or 2 MPH. Say you are going 60 according to your speedometer, do you think it would be fair for a cop to give you a ticket for going 61 according to his instruments? Going under the speed limit is not a very good option. Speed limits are set to get people from point A to point B at the fastest speed possible while maintaining safety. It would be pretty lame for everyone to have to drive at 55 MPH even though the speed limit is 60 MPH. The main road I take to work has a speed limit of 65 MPH. I don't want to see cops pull people over for going 66, 67 or 68 MPH. I want to see cops pull people over who are going 75+ MPH. I want to see cops pull people over who are driving reckless, cutting in and out of lanes and cutting people off. I could care less about the person going 1 or 2 miles over the speed limit.
You are undoubtedly aware that, as in Florida, a number of people in Texas consider it their "right" to drive, intoxicated, at 100 mph in heavy traffic until slamming into a minivan full of children.
Huh? What group of people advocate getting drunk, speeding and slamming into a minivan full of children? Or are you just exaggerating?
It seems that you have more of a problem with obeying the law
Huh? It takes 60 seconds to go 1 mile at 60 miles per hour. The GP said 57 seconds. So that might be about 61 miles per hour. Would you want to get a ticket for going 1 mile per hour or less over the speed limit? I know I wouldn't. It is not like the speedometer in your car is accurate to within 1 mile per hour. How about we start slapping you with big fines every time you go 1/2 a mile per hour over the speed limit?
because "tracking" is not even the use of the system!
Are you a troll? Or do you work for this "system"? Down here in central Florida (Orlando), we have had this system for a few years and it is called the "Sun Pass". The system is set up for tracking, period. When I go through a toll, if my balance is low, my credit card is automaticallly billed for more money so I don't run out of "toll money". Last week when I went through a toll, I noticed that the toll showed a "low battery" sign to me. Within two days, I had a letter from the toll "authority" that my battery was low and where I could go to get a new one.
These systems are set up with monster databases that track "users" of the system. If you really think that you could be wanted by the FBI and have one of these toll devices and not get caught, your are either lying or are an idiot.
Sane persons will see Texas' proposal to use it for automated vehicle registration and tollbooths as exactly what it is.
Control always starts out as a "better way" to do some thing. The problem comes when the "government" chooses to use this type of tech to expand their control. Do you have _any_ guarantees that the govt. won't take this tech to the next level? No, you don't.
I served in the U.S.M.C during the Gulf War. I am not some anti-American type person. However, I am not the type that would sit back while the govt. tries to get more and more control. I have an RFID based toll device now. I use it every day I go to work. It lets me bypass waiting in long lines to pay tolls in the central Orlando area. However, I personally am not happy with the fact that my "govt." can track my daily movements. I guess that is the price I pay for not having to wait in lines. How much longer do you think it will be until there are RFID passes for most of the things we do in life? How long do you think it will be until we have RFID based credit cards? Soon, our "govt." will know ever place we go and every expense we make.
Obviously the argument to that is "if you are not a criminal and have nothing to hide, why would you care"? Well I am _not_ a criminal and I have _nothing_ to hide, however I STILL WANT MY PRIVACY!
I am throwing away my mod points in this post to reply. Exactly _how_ do you come up with the notion that it is the voters fault? If I only get to vote between a Dem or Rep Congress critter, exactly how can I win as a voter? Both are going to take bribes and vote for laws that they received the most bribes on. Is there one member of Congress or Senator that did not accept one bribe in 2004?
So exactly how can we as voters have any influence? Voting doesn't work anymore. Our "representivite democracy" doesn't represent the common person anymore. The only way to get something done in the government is to have millions of dollars in bribe money.
It is only slower the first time a link it hit. The Coral network will download the content and cache it and it will be much faster from then. Also, the Coral network can handle a much higher load than this guys site can. Once the/. effect takes hold, the Coral network will be much fater. Try going back to the original link in my post. I bet it comes up very fast now since it has been cached in the Coral network. ; )
If they wanted to, they could have gone after you for every cassette or VHS tape you ever copied. What stopped them was cost/benefit
No, what stopped them was Fair Use and the fact that back then, copyright terms were not as long and the "government" was not as bought-out as they are today with things like 95 year copyright or life + 70 years copyright or the DMCA or all kinds of other crap. I would love to just see a bunch of 8-Track Tapes again ; )
Exactly. You didn't write the song, make the move, etc. If you want to own the content, create it or pay someone to create
Insightful? Man, the/. mods are getting very sucky. There is nothing "Insightful" about this. You didn't make that car you drive or the house you live in. Should you only be allowed to lease a car or home and never own it? No of course not and that would not go down well here in the USA. Imagine if every product you "bought" in the USA was only allowed to be "licensed" for use. How sucky would that be? This is exactly what the MPAA and RIAA are doing.
Just don't extend that to "I don't like the terms you offer this non-neccessity product under, but choose to consume it anyway without compensating you".
Well, at least here in the USA, the *AA's are not hurting for cash. You see, most Americans enjoy to spend their money. Most Americans don't have a problem paying for goods/services that are competitive and at a fair price. However, most Americans _do_ have a problem with someone trying to tell them what they can or cannot do with their purchase. For example, I just bought a Disney DVD. The DVD had all kinds of crap ads on it and it would not let you get to the movie until you watched the ads! My 3 year old daughter wanted to watch this DVD everyday. I got _real_ tired of forced ads. So I just used a few nice programs that rip the DVD and remove the menu and ads and burned my own version of the content that I paid for, that I can watch under my terms, with no forced ads.
Imagine you bought a car and you were only allowed to drive it between 9:00 AM and 5:00 PM? Or you bought a TV and the TV would only let you watch a show if you first watched 10 minutes of ads?
In a "free" market none of this is a problem since some other competitor comes along and would offer better terms that consumers would flocked to. However under our monopoly system where all the big labels join the RIAA or all the big studios join the MPAA, we consumers don't get much choice and we certainly don't get the ability to flex our spending-muscles to fight back. In our corrupted system we need to fight back however we can. IMO, I hope to see _every_ DRM format broken (I wish I was a big millionaire, I would give DVD John a big @ss salary) until the media companies come to their senses.
Ok so mono ports it to Linux but you're still limiting yourself.
I like and use both Java and C#. However, I have to tell you that your statement is wrong.
Yes, the C# of the MS world is MS only which sucks. However, Mono has taken C# to Linux, Windows, Mac, Solaris, FreeBSD and more coming in the next version due this year. The architectures are x86, PowerPC, S390 and SPARC-based systems and the next version coming out is going to have more. There are two 64 bits ports: SPARC v9 with Solaris and the AMD64 port. When Mono 1.2 comes out this year, there won't be any reason for me to use Java really. I personally like C# better and the big thing I _hate_ about Java has always been Java exceptions. Exceptions in C# are much nicer and you are not forced to handle them.
I have also noticed a huge advantage to Mono/.Net when it comes to memory footprint. When I run Java apps the memory usage gets high and the virtual memory usage gets really high. I love the Azureus program, however it always causes my MS Windows box to start hitting the swap file and MS Windows sucks at swap file usage compared to Linux so I am always forced to use Azureus under Linux. When I run C# apps, be it with Mono under Linux or MS.Net under MS Windows, the memory foot print is much smaller and swap is almost never used.
The last two GUI apps I have written have been in C# and they have at least the same startup time if not faster than a similar Java program and the memory foot print doesn't even come close to being as high as a similar Java program would be.
I don't want to sound as if I hate Java, because as I have said, I use both Java and C# and like them both. I have used some really nice Java apps that do things to keep the memory foot print down like IntelliJ IDEA. However, even with great programs like IntelliJ IDEA, the virtual memory still gets way up there due to the JVM.
considering my experience with Windows administration that just seems really extreme for any admin problem.
What do you work with tiny little networks? I am a senior programmer for a fortune 500 with 140,000+ employees. I work closely with our admins that try to maintain all of our custom code as well as our purchased software. We have so many unique systems all trying to work together that a week to fix a complex issue is often fast. We recently had an issue that Microsoft's own people came in and it took longer than a week to get fixed. It actually took a custom patch. Maybe the GP's issue wasn't limited to just Ghosting a PC and rebooting?
What is the point in taking jabs at people when you have no idea what the situation was?
What the license is about is making sure that those people that look at their code don't go off and make a replica operating system without in some way compensating Microsoft.
Are you serious? Do you _really_ think someone/some company can turn around and build a replica OS from a few "secret" API calls? Get real. Look how many years MS has tried to build an acceptable OS. It wasn't until Win2k that they had anything worth the money. MS spent many years in man hours and billions in development costs. I don't think disclosing some of their server/client communications protocols is going to allow someone to come along and build a Win32 replica.
All of your agruments you have made so far have been as if MS is just some good-ole-company that has just been trying to compete fairly. That is not the case. MS has leveraged their monopoly illegaly for a long time now and have been convicted of that in two separate nations. Now it is time for MS to pay the penalty. The main point of the punishment, IMO, is not what is best for MS (that wouldn't be much of a punishment), but to ask what is best for the industry/society. IMO, the best thing would be to force MS to disclose their "secret" OS API's so that the whole industry can leverage those on an equal footing instead of having all MS software have the leg-up because MS controls the OS.
Your arguments sound as if you believe that MS cannot compete on a level playing field. That if their competitors also have access to the same server API's, then MS will no longer be able to deliver a better product. Is MS really that bad at developing programs that if they are not the _only_ ones to have access to "secret" API's than their non-OS products will fail?
Oracle is a memory hog, however it is not made to compete with small databases such as MySQL. Oracle doesn't scale going _down_ to a tiny box with only 256 MB. Oracle scales up well to very big iron. The right tool for the right job.
TPC is all commercial though. I would love to see some two-way server comparisons running MYSQL and PostgreSQL to see how they stack, especially in price/performance.
I was wondering the same thing about Oracle. This might be a case of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing. I have read tons of news items about how Oracle is pushing Linux and according to this one, it seems Oracle leads on Linux with 360% growth
Oracle's Linux commitment began in 1998 with the first commercial database on Linux. Today, Oracle is the only major software vendor to provide first-line support for Red Hat and Novell/SUSE. All Oracle products are available on Linux and Oracle Database on Linux has met the Common Criteria Standard at EAL4, the highest industry security level for commercial software. Gartner Dataquest says Oracle is #1 on Linux with 360% growth.
Fastest benchmark result on four processors running Linux
On an HP Integrity rx4640 with four Intel Itanium 2 1.6GHz processors running Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS 3, Oracle Database 10g Standard Edition achieved:
World record four processor performance on Linux of 161,217 tpmC (transactions per minute)
A price-performance ratio of $3.94/tpmC.
Oracle, the first and only database provider to demonstrate TPC-C performance leadership on Linux, now holds more TPC-C world records on Linux than any other vendor. This latest benchmark result further demonstrates Oracle's commitment to delivering exceptional performance and reducing the total cost of ownership for all business needs.
Slashdot Mirror
I own a car company called MS-Cars. MS-Cars makes 96%+ of all the consumer cars driven in the _world_. MS-Cars not only make the cars, we make many of the parts for the cars. MS-Cars has _extensive_ patents on the process of building cars and car parts. MS-Cars also keeps everything proprietary. We don't share with any other company how to install an MS-Seat, MS-Engine, MS-Tire, etc into another car. If you do reverse engineer how to install one of our products in another car, your license is void and you are not entitled to use said product any longer. There are other 3rd party parts out in the market, however since MS-Cars controls 96%+ of all consumer cars, there is not much of a profit motive for 3rd party parts to fit or work with other cars. As MS-Cars enters other markets (MS-Oil), we are able to use our monopoly in consumer cars to "float" our new market attempt until we have been able to leverage our MS-Cars monopoly and create a new monopoly such as with MS-Oil. Our MS-Gas will be proprietary and will only work with MS-Cars. If you get MS-Gas to work with another car, your license to use MS-Gas is terminated.
Now you come along and try to start amliebsch-Cars. However, you soon find that most of the basic concepts of building a car have been patented by MS-Cars. You either have to give up or throw away years of previous industry knowlege and create all new methods taking years and costing a prohibitive amount of money. You find out that none of your customers can use MS-Parts because even if you get them to fit in amliebsch-Cars, the license of MS-Parts forbids it. You also find that there are not many 3rd party after market parts for amliebsch-Cars because they have all been made to only fit MS-Cars. If amliebsch-Cars ever does get some good products out, MS-Cars will probably just come along with our massive amount of monopoly money and buy out amliebsch-Cars so that once again we are the only alternative.
A monopoly is never good for consumers or the industry. Monopolies only help the holder of that monopoly.
Now, who could it be? Could it be Red Hat, SuSE, IBM or some other pro-Linux company? I have serious doubts about that. What about Microsoft? Well, MS has certainly paid for other "studies" to be done in the past. So I don't think there would be any major reason to not count MS in on this "study". Basically we just need to find out _who_ paid for this "study" to really see where the bias lays.
I remember last year I had a phone call from some unknown company that was doing a "study" about MS. I was asked how I felt about MS as a company. How I felt about the products put out by MS and if I "trusted" MS. As soon as I answered that I "did not trust MS as a company", I was told my "interview" was over and "thank you for your time". So it seems as soon as one of these companies get a negative response about the company that are footing the bill, the interview dies.
Does anyone know who _paid_ for this "study"?
Why did you move from Clermont? For a job? I love it out here, though here in central Florida we have our fair share of @ss hole drivers to deal with. I have never been to Texas to compare the two though. I grew up in the north east, about 25 miles out side of Philadelphia. I thought there were @ss holes in Philly, central Florida certainly has more @ss hole drivers IMO.
You do know that the radar guns police use are not perfectly accurate? They can be off by a say 1 or 2 MPH. Say you are going 60 according to your speedometer, do you think it would be fair for a cop to give you a ticket for going 61 according to his instruments? Going under the speed limit is not a very good option. Speed limits are set to get people from point A to point B at the fastest speed possible while maintaining safety. It would be pretty lame for everyone to have to drive at 55 MPH even though the speed limit is 60 MPH. The main road I take to work has a speed limit of 65 MPH. I don't want to see cops pull people over for going 66, 67 or 68 MPH. I want to see cops pull people over who are going 75+ MPH. I want to see cops pull people over who are driving reckless, cutting in and out of lanes and cutting people off. I could care less about the person going 1 or 2 miles over the speed limit.
These systems are set up with monster databases that track "users" of the system. If you really think that you could be wanted by the FBI and have one of these toll devices and not get caught, your are either lying or are an idiot.
I served in the U.S.M.C during the Gulf War. I am not some anti-American type person. However, I am not the type that would sit back while the govt. tries to get more and more control. I have an RFID based toll device now. I use it every day I go to work. It lets me bypass waiting in long lines to pay tolls in the central Orlando area. However, I personally am not happy with the fact that my "govt." can track my daily movements. I guess that is the price I pay for not having to wait in lines. How much longer do you think it will be until there are RFID passes for most of the things we do in life? How long do you think it will be until we have RFID based credit cards? Soon, our "govt." will know ever place we go and every expense we make.
Obviously the argument to that is "if you are not a criminal and have nothing to hide, why would you care"? Well I am _not_ a criminal and I have _nothing_ to hide, however I STILL WANT MY PRIVACY!
Thanks for that link to http://www.abandonia.com/. Do you know of any more types of sites with classic games that have been abandoned or are now free?
So exactly how can we as voters have any influence? Voting doesn't work anymore. Our "representivite democracy" doesn't represent the common person anymore. The only way to get something done in the government is to have millions of dollars in bribe money.
It is only slower the first time a link it hit. The Coral network will download the content and cache it and it will be much faster from then. Also, the Coral network can handle a much higher load than this guys site can. Once the /. effect takes hold, the Coral network will be much fater. Try going back to the original link in my post. I bet it comes up very fast now since it has been cached in the Coral network. ; )
Use the Coralized link here!
Imagine you bought a car and you were only allowed to drive it between 9:00 AM and 5:00 PM? Or you bought a TV and the TV would only let you watch a show if you first watched 10 minutes of ads?
In a "free" market none of this is a problem since some other competitor comes along and would offer better terms that consumers would flocked to. However under our monopoly system where all the big labels join the RIAA or all the big studios join the MPAA, we consumers don't get much choice and we certainly don't get the ability to flex our spending-muscles to fight back. In our corrupted system we need to fight back however we can. IMO, I hope to see _every_ DRM format broken (I wish I was a big millionaire, I would give DVD John a big @ss salary) until the media companies come to their senses.
Yes, the C# of the MS world is MS only which sucks. However, Mono has taken C# to Linux, Windows, Mac, Solaris, FreeBSD and more coming in the next version due this year. The architectures are x86, PowerPC, S390 and SPARC-based systems and the next version coming out is going to have more. There are two 64 bits ports: SPARC v9 with Solaris and the AMD64 port. When Mono 1.2 comes out this year, there won't be any reason for me to use Java really. I personally like C# better and the big thing I _hate_ about Java has always been Java exceptions. Exceptions in C# are much nicer and you are not forced to handle them.
I have also noticed a huge advantage to Mono/.Net when it comes to memory footprint. When I run Java apps the memory usage gets high and the virtual memory usage gets really high. I love the Azureus program, however it always causes my MS Windows box to start hitting the swap file and MS Windows sucks at swap file usage compared to Linux so I am always forced to use Azureus under Linux. When I run C# apps, be it with Mono under Linux or MS .Net under MS Windows, the memory foot print is much smaller and swap is almost never used.
The last two GUI apps I have written have been in C# and they have at least the same startup time if not faster than a similar Java program and the memory foot print doesn't even come close to being as high as a similar Java program would be.
I don't want to sound as if I hate Java, because as I have said, I use both Java and C# and like them both. I have used some really nice Java apps that do things to keep the memory foot print down like IntelliJ IDEA. However, even with great programs like IntelliJ IDEA, the virtual memory still gets way up there due to the JVM.
What is the point in taking jabs at people when you have no idea what the situation was?
All of your agruments you have made so far have been as if MS is just some good-ole-company that has just been trying to compete fairly. That is not the case. MS has leveraged their monopoly illegaly for a long time now and have been convicted of that in two separate nations. Now it is time for MS to pay the penalty. The main point of the punishment, IMO, is not what is best for MS (that wouldn't be much of a punishment), but to ask what is best for the industry/society. IMO, the best thing would be to force MS to disclose their "secret" OS API's so that the whole industry can leverage those on an equal footing instead of having all MS software have the leg-up because MS controls the OS.
Your arguments sound as if you believe that MS cannot compete on a level playing field. That if their competitors also have access to the same server API's, then MS will no longer be able to deliver a better product. Is MS really that bad at developing programs that if they are not the _only_ ones to have access to "secret" API's than their non-OS products will fail?
Oracle is a memory hog, however it is not made to compete with small databases such as MySQL. Oracle doesn't scale going _down_ to a tiny box with only 256 MB. Oracle scales up well to very big iron. The right tool for the right job.
TPC is all commercial though. I would love to see some two-way server comparisons running MYSQL and PostgreSQL to see how they stack, especially in price/performance.
That still doesn't fix broken JavaScript. For example, have Firefox spoof being IE and watch all the JavaScript errors you get
That still doesn't fix broken JavaScript. For example, have Firefox spoof being IE and watch all the JavaScript errors you get.
That still doesn't fix broken JavaScript. For example, have Firefox spoof being IE and watch all the JavaScript errors you get.
I happen to like _underscores_ better than italic ; )