I hope the Australian government would think long and hard before adopting them for workstation use.
The longer and harder you think, the more time gets wasted. You lose nothing when givng Linux a try.
I don't think I could recommend it to Sally Secretary quite yet.
How did your Sally Secretary learn to use Windows and Office? Osmosis? I doubt it. Trining isn't a factor for normal users.
In Gnome, for example, I occasionally get a dialog box that says " occurred. For more information, click on the help button." Naturally there is no help button.
In MS Office, Sally frequently gets "It appears you are typing a letter" message. Does she know how to turn it off? Is there a toll free MS support number she can contact?
What about " Program performed illegal operation. Instruction could not be Read" messgaes? Those pop-ups? Those BSODs? Does BSOD come with a Help button?
Australian Democrats have put questions on notice in Parliament that will require all government ministers to disclose how much money their departments spend on Microsoft products each year.
The question to ask is: How much money does Microsoft spend on each minister. That would be truly embarassing, specially in the US.
Proprietary hardware - laptops. Proprietary drivers fro WiFi that lock you to Windoze. And a proprietary Intel Centrino doublespeak.
Is this what poor third-world countries yearn for? Should they leapfrog to disaster? I'm disappointed someone like Mr.Kofi Annan suggested this stuff to poor nations.
Okay, tell me something you can do with XP, but not with Win95. Don't spout all that Active Directory, Disk Fragmenting, AutoUpdate and other crap. Any useful app that runs on XP, but not on 95?
BTW, 95 can support USB as well, only MS doesn't promote it.
From the article: "Hotmail figures quite prominently in our investigations not because Microsoft is a bad company but because they have provided a good service that can be used anywhere," he said.
Is this insightful? The reason why mobos are cheap commodity items is bcos of the fragmentation. The more a few players like nVidia, Intel etc. dominate - the more the market aggregates and users lose out.
15 years ago, MS DOS (which can do everything that XP does BTW) was $50 retail. 8 years ago, Win95 (which can do everything that XP does, except the Active Directory and Kerberos crap) was $50 retail. Now, XP Home is $200 retail, and XP-PRo is $300 retail.
Now look at the h/w market: 15 years ago the Intel 8087 co-processor was $800. 8 years ago, a more powerful 80486 was $200 Now, for less than $100, you get a blazing fast P4-2GHz.
Moral: Market aggregation is never good for the user.
What we really want is proper manufacturers' drivers for all the chipsets on the board, included on the CD that comes with the motherboard.
Exactly! And you can bet your last penny that they'd never ask anyone that question. Not a single CEO would have answered it anyway - they are only too aware that Bill Almighty and Intel Godfather wouldn't like it one bit!
In fact, the entire meeting simply Ignores Linux - prolly they are in Step 2 of the Ghandicon. I'm inclined to think mobo mfrs could be subsidised by the big guys to make life difficult for Linux, but then I'm prone to conspiracy theories...
gather some of the leading engineers from these companies, and ask them how they thought the market would progress over the next few years.
A totally redundant exercise. Engineers normally have a choice - their pet project, or pay-check - they normally choose the latter.
The way to find out about market directions is to ask the big bosses. BillyBoy would be a nice choice to ask, but he wouldn't speak his mind. You can't ask RMS or Linus - one is a philosopher and the other is just an Engineer - so you go back to Step 1 !
You can't ask AnandTech or THG - they're paid to report numbers, not analyse and predict. You can't ask Gartner or Aberdeen - they've been bought over severally. That leaves just 2 people - you can ask Slashdot, or just yourself.
If you asked Slashdot, the noise would drown the signal by a factor of 1000000. The best person to ask this question would be - yourself!!
I did it (I mean myself) and this is what I came up with. There's a lot of consolidation going on now in the commodity desktop market. There's more than 1 CPU mfr, more than 1 RAM mfr, more than 1 hard disk mfr. , BIOS, video card etc. Controlling all these guys isn't an easy task.
Both Intel and MS seem to be gunning for a sizable section of the mobo pie. Intel plays it with chipsets, MS plays it with Palladium. Neither is likely to succeed, IMO. The mobo and the tech market stays a commodity market. Windows CANNOT be a commodity OS, hence Linux is the only candidate for the people's OS. Next question please...
The article appears to focus on an inititive from Anandtech to unify the thoughts of 13 major mainboard manufacturing big bosses to point the industry where it wants to go.
My one-sentence summary.
"Since an American company is set to emerge shortly as the one and only mobo mfr., we at AnandTech spoke to 13 doomed CEOs and got their last reactions."
To see how this happened, watch this space when your mobo ships with Palladium/ NGSCB, TCG, TCPA, whatever, or 2006, whichever is earlier.
The problem...motherboard CEOs are going to be driving the market... there are so many. This happens in commodity markets
This is actually a good thing. In fact it's the redeeming aspect when Intel makes chipsets that make running Linux a tough experience. A large no. of mobo mfrs means more slaves for MS/Intel to buy out / contain. The market stays a commodity market this way.
which become well understood and have a relatively low R&D expense
Actually, we 'think' that the mobo business is a well-understood one. How many of us know the role of mobos in the Palladium effort? How many u'stand the compulsions of BIOS writers like AMI who act as poodles to gorillas? And lastly, 5 mobos with the same chipset give 5 different benchmark results. How does this happen? In a truly commodity market, the only differentiator is price, not performance or quality.
Just because they plug-in other peoples processors to specs created by those other people does not mean that they innovate the market.
Processor alone does not a mobo make. In fact, a cheap mobo can screw the performance figures of a top CPU. Mobo mfrs innovate by NOT adopting Palladium, designing own chipsets, etc. It's the rest of the folks - CPU makers, video card makers, s/w writers, etc. that don't innovate.
"what I'd like to see would be a closed room discussion with CCTV cameras between, Jobs, Ellison, Gates and McNeally.... with knives."
Actually all 4 of them have enuff money for 100s of lifetimes, and are unlikely to care two hoots about where the tech world is heading. You'd get better results with Bill Gates, RMS, Linus Torvalds, Slashdot Jack and Joe ServicePack - no knives, no censorship, no ducking questions - in full public view. That should be interesting.
I predict that very soon MSFT will have to lower substantially the cost of Office, further eroding its margins. Better start cashing in Bill.
Great point! In fact, the no. 1 enemy of MS is the HERD mentality. There's no logic or reasoning when a herd is involved. If enuff people switch to Linux - say about 10% desktop users, the combined circle of influence would swallow about 80% of the (win)Dozers into a rude awakening.
Lest they appear stupid, they'd rush into this Linux, just the way they got into Windoze. BTW, how did people learn to use Windows? Osmosis? I doubt. They'll have to spend a bit of their grey cells to get the hang of Linux - but once Linux is SEXY and the IN_THING, they'll go after it like sheep.
No problem.. they buy (sponsor, ad-campaign) the people who drive the Economy. Major problem solved. Only Corporate and indl users to be bought. Enter the SCOrporate scourge - 1,500 big guns terrified. Indl and small users - well, threats from R*AA etc. should scare most of them. The rest will be silenced by Palladium.
2. MS can't buy Linux
So, they settle or buy out those who make Linux valuable. AOL, SCO, that antivirus firm etc... They fight a few - Lindows; they punish the box-pushers (HPaq) into submission- major problems solved.
But when the problem is soooooooooo huge, even 5% of it is big enough to make the rest look stupid. And that can tip the balance. If users start FLooding towards Linux, all the MS FUD will be swallowed.. -
What people tend to forget is that there are gatekeepers in the open-source community, too
Actually, only the Open Source community has gate-keepers. The closed source giants have toll booths instead - a one-way traffic. And if you don't like the picture, you can't get your money back as well. -
I personally believe Microsoft's biggest threat are themselves
If that were indeed the case, don't u think they'd have been dead as a dodo long ago? Fact is, they've got $40bn in the bank, and all Linux makers and writers and coders would be less than 5% of that.
I'd say that MS pretends to be their own threat, and milk those users with lots of inertia - totally DRY. Those who think and plan in advance, ignoring all the BS - they're the ones who succeed to move to Linux. The rest are all more fodder to the mill. -
Also remember that Linux is a bigger threat to Unix vendors than it is to MS, because the barriers to migration are lower
Frequently as this BS is put out I find it hard to believe. Why should Linux be a threat to Unix. Let's take Solaris. Why would someone buy a Sun system? 'cos many folks write s/w for it - great CAD/CAM s/w, telco s/w, graphics etc..... there's a lot of stuff avbl for Solaris on a cafeteria basis. Same with IRIX (film and video) and HP-UX. Not with Linux. You gotta go hunting for folks to write packaged/preconfigured s/w to qork with Linux - anfd that's no mean feat.
OTOH Windoze users present Linux/Open Source coders with a single large market to go after. Thus Linux is a much bigger threat to any platform/OS/ application that has acquired critical mass/ market share. And that's Windows, not Unix. -
If Microsoft would stick to hardware, such as keyboards, mice and joysticks, elements that Linux and the Open Source movement, and Free Software Foundation has no interest in, Microsoft would soon realize that their only competition is Logitech.
Actually this is not funny at all - I'd say Insightful.
Let's realise that Linux is successful 'cos MS divided the h/w folks, and that led to competition and commodity pricing, at the same time market aggregation.
In a way, MS not getting into h/w is good for Linux. OTOH if they make a modified XBox, say XXBox (what about XXXBox:->) and put Palladium on it, that could cut off Linux entirely, since this XXBox would be $150 for h/w and s/w would be $50 per year!
Okay I see... Economy bad--> People find MSware expensive --> People start to think --> discover MS is lousy despite all Gartner reports --> read Slashdot --> get to learn about this thing called Linux --> adopt it...yes!
how can you be on/. and not know the answer to this question as if it were the only thing you were taught as a child!!!!:-
My internal parser core dumped while reading this complex sentence. Lemme split it up..
how can you be on/. and not know the answer to this question
followed by as if it were the only thing you were taught as a child!!!!:-|
ha.. if it were the only thing I'd been taught as a child, well.. I would've known this...
and BTW, is this the only thing children are taught in the US? Wars, tanks and weapons? No wonder then, why society is so screwed up and values so messed up..
Slashdot Mirror
I hope the Australian government would think long and hard before adopting them for workstation use.
The longer and harder you think, the more time gets wasted. You lose nothing when givng Linux a try.
I don't think I could recommend it to Sally Secretary quite yet.
How did your Sally Secretary learn to use Windows and Office? Osmosis? I doubt it. Trining isn't a factor for normal users.
In Gnome, for example, I occasionally get a dialog box that says " occurred. For more information, click on the help button." Naturally there is no help button.
In MS Office, Sally frequently gets "It appears you are typing a letter" message. Does she know how to turn it off? Is there a toll free MS support number she can contact?
What about " Program performed illegal operation. Instruction could not be Read" messgaes? Those pop-ups? Those BSODs? Does BSOD come with a Help button?
Please.. think before you troll.
-
Australian Democrats have put questions on notice in Parliament that will require all government ministers to disclose how much money their departments spend on Microsoft products each year.
The question to ask is:
How much money does Microsoft spend on each minister. That would be truly embarassing, specially in the US.
-
Proprietary hardware - laptops. Proprietary drivers fro WiFi that lock you to Windoze. And a proprietary Intel Centrino doublespeak.
Is this what poor third-world countries yearn for? Should they leapfrog to disaster? I'm disappointed someone like Mr.Kofi Annan suggested this stuff to poor nations.
-
DOS and Win95 can do everything WinXP can???
Okay, tell me something you can do with XP, but not with Win95. Don't spout all that Active Directory, Disk Fragmenting, AutoUpdate and other crap. Any useful app that runs on XP, but not on 95?
BTW, 95 can support USB as well, only MS doesn't promote it.
-
From the article:
a hahahahahahahahahahaaaaaaaa
"Hotmail figures quite prominently in our investigations not because Microsoft is a bad company but because they have provided a good service that can be used anywhere," he said.
Mwuhaa
Mwuhaha
Mwuhahaha
Mwuhahahaha
Mwuhah
More Useful Everyday.
Real Hot mail.
-
If you get hotmail, you could end up in the .NET and your Passport impounded!
Hotmail - More Useful Eeryday!!
Thanks for the tip.
-
What do you get when you gather 13 of the most influential CEOs in the motherboard market?
Bus Error..
Memory fault - core dumped.
Program performed Illegal Operation. Interview cannot be Read.
Uncertified drivers.
Certified nonsense.
etc..
-
McBride of Caldera, er, SCO, looks like a retarded gimp
Excellent! Now, the writers of gimp, the Linux image-manipulation tool; can sue Mr.Bride for copying it's looks? Best news in weeks. Thanks.
-
Is this insightful? The reason why mobos are cheap commodity items is bcos of the fragmentation. The more a few players like nVidia, Intel etc. dominate - the more the market aggregates and users lose out.
15 years ago, MS DOS (which can do everything that XP does BTW) was $50 retail.
8 years ago, Win95 (which can do everything that XP does, except the Active Directory and Kerberos crap) was $50 retail.
Now, XP Home is $200 retail, and XP-PRo is $300 retail.
Now look at the h/w market:
15 years ago the Intel 8087 co-processor was $800.
8 years ago, a more powerful 80486 was $200
Now, for less than $100, you get a blazing fast P4-2GHz.
Moral: Market aggregation is never good for the user.
-
What we really want is proper manufacturers' drivers for all the chipsets on the board, included on the CD that comes with the motherboard.
Exactly! And you can bet your last penny that they'd never ask anyone that question. Not a single CEO would have answered it anyway - they are only too aware that Bill Almighty and Intel Godfather wouldn't like it one bit!
In fact, the entire meeting simply Ignores Linux - prolly they are in Step 2 of the Ghandicon. I'm inclined to think mobo mfrs could be subsidised by the big guys to make life difficult for Linux, but then I'm prone to conspiracy theories...
Nice point.
-
gather some of the leading engineers from these companies, and ask them how they thought the market would progress over the next few years.
A totally redundant exercise. Engineers normally have a choice - their pet project, or pay-check - they normally choose the latter.
The way to find out about market directions is to ask the big bosses. BillyBoy would be a nice choice to ask, but he wouldn't speak his mind. You can't ask RMS or Linus - one is a philosopher and the other is just an Engineer - so you go back to Step 1 !
You can't ask AnandTech or THG - they're paid to report numbers, not analyse and predict. You can't ask Gartner or Aberdeen - they've been bought over severally. That leaves just 2 people - you can ask Slashdot, or just yourself.
If you asked Slashdot, the noise would drown the signal by a factor of 1000000. The best person to ask this question would be - yourself!!
I did it (I mean myself) and this is what I came up with. There's a lot of consolidation going on now in the commodity desktop market. There's more than 1 CPU mfr, more than 1 RAM mfr, more than 1 hard disk mfr. , BIOS, video card etc. Controlling all these guys isn't an easy task.
Both Intel and MS seem to be gunning for a sizable section of the mobo pie. Intel plays it with chipsets, MS plays it with Palladium. Neither is likely to succeed, IMO. The mobo and the tech market stays a commodity market. Windows CANNOT be a commodity OS, hence Linux is the only candidate for the people's OS. Next question please...
-
One-sentence summary:
The article appears to focus on an inititive from Anandtech to unify the thoughts of 13 major mainboard manufacturing big bosses to point the industry where it wants to go.
My one-sentence summary.
"Since an American company is set to emerge shortly as the one and only mobo mfr., we at AnandTech spoke to 13 doomed CEOs and got their last reactions."
To see how this happened, watch this space when your mobo ships with Palladium/ NGSCB, TCG, TCPA, whatever, or 2006, whichever is earlier.
-
The problem ...motherboard CEOs are going to be driving the market ... there are so many. This happens in commodity markets
This is actually a good thing. In fact it's the redeeming aspect when Intel makes chipsets that make running Linux a tough experience. A large no. of mobo mfrs means more slaves for MS/Intel to buy out / contain. The market stays a commodity market this way.
which become well understood and have a relatively low R&D expense
Actually, we 'think' that the mobo business is a well-understood one. How many of us know the role of mobos in the Palladium effort? How many u'stand the compulsions of BIOS writers like AMI who act as poodles to gorillas? And lastly, 5 mobos with the same chipset give 5 different benchmark results. How does this happen? In a truly commodity market, the only differentiator is price, not performance or quality.
Just because they plug-in other peoples processors to specs created by those other people does not mean that they innovate the market.
Processor alone does not a mobo make. In fact, a cheap mobo can screw the performance figures of a top CPU. Mobo mfrs innovate by NOT adopting Palladium, designing own chipsets, etc. It's the rest of the folks - CPU makers, video card makers, s/w writers, etc. that don't innovate.
"what I'd like to see would be a closed room discussion with CCTV cameras between, Jobs, Ellison, Gates and McNeally.... with knives."
Actually all 4 of them have enuff money for 100s of lifetimes, and are unlikely to care two hoots about where the tech world is heading. You'd get better results with Bill Gates, RMS, Linus Torvalds, Slashdot Jack and Joe ServicePack - no knives, no censorship, no ducking questions - in full public view. That should be interesting.
-
I predict that very soon MSFT will have to lower substantially the cost of Office, further eroding its margins. Better start cashing in Bill.
Great point! In fact, the no. 1 enemy of MS is the HERD mentality. There's no logic or reasoning when a herd is involved. If enuff people switch to Linux - say about 10% desktop users, the combined circle of influence would swallow about 80% of the (win)Dozers into a rude awakening.
Lest they appear stupid, they'd rush into this Linux, just the way they got into Windoze. BTW, how did people learn to use Windows? Osmosis? I doubt. They'll have to spend a bit of their grey cells to get the hang of Linux - but once Linux is SEXY and the IN_THING, they'll go after it like sheep.
2005, in my estimate.
-
1. MS can't buy the economy
No problem.. they buy (sponsor, ad-campaign) the people who drive the Economy. Major problem solved. Only Corporate and indl users to be bought. Enter the SCOrporate scourge - 1,500 big guns terrified.
Indl and small users - well, threats from R*AA etc. should scare most of them. The rest will be silenced by Palladium.
2. MS can't buy Linux
So, they settle or buy out those who make Linux valuable. AOL, SCO, that antivirus firm etc... They fight a few - Lindows; they punish the box-pushers (HPaq) into submission- major problems solved.
But when the problem is soooooooooo huge, even 5% of it is big enough to make the rest look stupid. And that can tip the balance. If users start FLooding towards Linux, all the MS FUD will be swallowed..
-
So traditional MS strategies
What people tend to forget is that there are gatekeepers in the open-source community, too
Actually, only the Open Source community has gate-keepers. The closed source giants have toll booths instead - a one-way traffic. And if you don't like the picture, you can't get your money back as well.
-
I personally believe Microsoft's biggest threat are themselves
If that were indeed the case, don't u think they'd have been dead as a dodo long ago? Fact is, they've got $40bn in the bank, and all Linux makers and writers and coders would be less than 5% of that.
I'd say that MS pretends to be their own threat, and milk those users with lots of inertia - totally DRY. Those who think and plan in advance, ignoring all the BS - they're the ones who succeed to move to Linux. The rest are all more fodder to the mill.
-
Also remember that Linux is a bigger threat to Unix vendors than it is to MS, because the barriers to migration are lower
Frequently as this BS is put out I find it hard to believe. Why should Linux be a threat to Unix. Let's take Solaris. Why would someone buy a Sun system? 'cos many folks write s/w for it - great CAD/CAM s/w, telco s/w, graphics etc..... there's a lot of stuff avbl for Solaris on a cafeteria basis. Same with IRIX (film and video) and HP-UX.
Not with Linux. You gotta go hunting for folks to write packaged/preconfigured s/w to qork with Linux - anfd that's no mean feat.
OTOH Windoze users present Linux/Open Source coders with a single large market to go after. Thus Linux is a much bigger threat to any platform/OS/ application that has acquired critical mass/ market share. And that's Windows, not Unix.
-
If Microsoft would stick to hardware, such as keyboards, mice and joysticks, elements that Linux and the Open Source movement, and Free Software Foundation has no interest in, Microsoft would soon realize that their only competition is Logitech.
:->) and put Palladium on it, that could cut off Linux entirely, since this XXBox would be $150 for h/w and s/w would be $50 per year!
Actually this is not funny at all - I'd say Insightful.
Let's realise that Linux is successful 'cos MS divided the h/w folks, and that led to competition and commodity pricing, at the same time market aggregation.
In a way, MS not getting into h/w is good for Linux. OTOH if they make a modified XBox, say XXBox (what about XXXBox
Be careful what you pray for!
-
Actually the article refers the no. 1 risk as:
The Economy!! How can the economy be a 'risk'??
Okay I see... Economy bad--> People find MSware expensive --> People start to think --> discover MS is lousy despite all Gartner reports --> read Slashdot --> get to learn about this thing called Linux --> adopt it...yes!
All risks lead to Linux!!
-
First risk: Prospects who believe anything they read from the press, including Slashdot!
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how can you be on /. and not know the answer to this question as if it were the only thing you were taught as a child!!!! :-
/. and not know the answer to this question
:-|
My internal parser core dumped while reading this complex sentence. Lemme split it up..
how can you be on
followed by
as if it were the only thing you were taught as a child!!!!
ha.. if it were the only thing I'd been taught as a child, well.. I would've known this...
and BTW, is this the only thing children are taught in the US? Wars, tanks and weapons? No wonder then, why society is so screwed up and values so messed up..
-
'Reserved' for aliens or something?
Or maybe new Operating Systems from Microsoft? Either way, interesting.
-
I thought without the MS connection, NBC by itself was quite harmless :-)
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I'd like a sensor that sniffs the RIAA and update me via MSN!!
-