Go back and do a 5 year comparison and Red Hat looks much better with the exception of the recent publicity stunt (and a run-up prior to it that I'm sure the SEC will be taking a look at.)
Also consider the total amount invested in each company... 126 million for SCOX more than a billion for Red Hat.
"Maybe I shouldn't care... and in reality it isn't going to make a difference in my day whether they sell those boxes or not. It just bothers me that Linux is being portrayed this way to the general public. My message to the people who run Fry's Electronics (and any other outlet who may sell Linux PCs) is simple: If you are going to sell Linux boxes, please educate your staff on the subject, rather than allowing them to sound ignorant in front of your customers. It is an embarrassment to you as much as it is to the Linux community. Since you are selling Linux boxes, please make sure that they are set with a language appropriate to your locale. If your local to France, sell a French 'speaking' machine. It's that simple. One last thing: Load a distribution that is consumer friendly. This should have been consideration number one, but since you missed it entirely, I'm pointing it out now."
I agree with this, but I also realize that the people in these stores are not computer experts of ANY kind. They can't answer questions about Windows either, although they are more inclined to react to Windows questions with something out of their own experience.
One of the biggest problems with Windows right now in fact is that there is so little DEFINITIVE reference material on it from a users point of view. Microsoft stopped documenting anything beyond the APIs a long time ago and now everything your read about Windows is speculation. Diagnosing Windows problems has gotten to be a voodoo art more than a well defined process. All the more reason for it to wind up in the sh*t can of history where it belongs.
As far as the bad version of Linux this thing is running, I bet the hardware AND software came bundled to Fry's from China at a super bargain price.
On the other hand, if my intention was to buy a cheap machine to run Linux on, I'd feel a lot better about getting one of these than one of the cheap Windows machines. Chances are the cheap Linux machine has more generic components that will operate with ANY version of Linux, while the Windows machines are more likely to include some proprietary component to make you either dependent on the manufacturer, Microsoft, or both.
If I were in the market for a laptop right now I'd probably get one of those $700 Lindows version and then install Debian on it. I bet it would work just fine.
I really don't think the Slashdotter attention span is any different (or if different, it is longer) than the average Internet user.
When articles appear on the first page, they get attention, as they scroll to the bottom they get less, as they move to background pages they get significant;y less.
While I often look beyond the front page, I am less likely to delve into the articles or discussions there, since almost everything that needs to be said HAS been said by then.
I've carried on conversations with people regarding Slashdot articles long after the article appears. This can take place in journal entries or via e-mail where the discussion material can be easily kept as opposed to Slashdot comments which ultimately disappear anyway.
The fact that people don't continue to click on the original source URLs doesn't mean anything.
Some may have rallied around him for good reasons, but I think most just took it as a convenient opportunity to bash Republicans
From http://www.freemikehawash.org/
"On April 28, the day before Mike would have been ordered released, the
U.S. Justice Department issued a Complaint, charging Mike with Conspiracy to
Levy War on the United States. Mike is being targeted because he is a Muslim.
The Justice Department has organized a smear campaign to portray him as a radical."
From Warblogging (a blog about making war against Republicans apparently):
"I urge you to write letters to the editors of your local newspapers.
Call your senators, call your congressmen. Call into your local radio talk shows.
Make a fuss. Tell everyone who will listen about Mike Hawash.
He deserves it, and so does the next one who will be dragged into this Kafka-esque nightmare."
If you browse around and read other articles on many of the private publications that spoke out on this you find constant Bush bashing,
comparisons of Republicans to Nazis, an much worse. Liberals figured that this successful natuaralized American of 17 years had a good
chance of actually being innocent, so what better way to give the Bush administration grief.
What I don't understand is, why don't the Liberals actually wait till they have some solid information before they bash away?
Time after time they just make themselves look like air-heads on things like this.
Here is a clue: What MOTIVE would the current administration or any administration have for falsely arresting anyone on
terrorism charges? This notion that the administration hates Arabs just doesn't hold water. They arrested these people because they HAD
something on them. Does that mean that every single one will be found guilty? No. But if I let party politics rule my every decision
as most of these people seem to do, I think I'd WAIT till one of the innocents had been let go to start my smear campaign. A lot less erroneous web pages
to clean up that way. (4000 hits on google to web content proclaiming this guy's innocence).
I have no use for RIM. However a group of my friends convinced me to get the RIM pagers when they were bundled with Yahoo Instant Messaging a couple years ago. The pagers themselves were still outrageously expensive considering what they did. The service itself was spotty at best I spent more time twisting and turning and moving from one spot to another to actually receive a signal and about 1 message in 3 that I sent actually got anywhere. Since the monthly price for the service was better with the Yahoo version than with the standard RIM service (about a third I think) we all put up with the shoddy service.
But after only 6 months, RIM pre-announced that they would not be continuing their deal with Yahoo, and that our only option would be to discontinue the service or convert to the much more expensive RIM service (which actually didn't even have instant messaging at all!) This was a pure bait and switch deal as far as I was concerned.
The combination of 802.11 devices coming down in price as well as initiatives such as Verizon's putting wireless hot-spots at all the phone booths will obsolete this technology real fast.
This is exactly the same double-speak that allows some people to equate open source with communism.
In any system of government that did not include at least some element of capitalism, open source would not be allowed to exist. There would be one operating system deemed best for everyone.
Don't make the mistake of confusing the system we have in America with pure capitalism. We aren't even close any more.
"This system is capitalism with baggage. In true capticalism, SCO would never sue anyone because there would be no laws copyrights, IP, etc.. for them to use."
"Capticalism"??? Maybe you have hit on something here... there needs to be a new word for the type of capitalism that SCO is practicing I would vote for "crapitalism", which would be indicative of what the SCO board of directors is full of.
Red Hat is in a much better position to show that the SCO nuisance lawsuit has hurt it's business. While IBM could eventually do this too in a counter suit, Red Hat suing now can provide injunctive relief against the SCO FUD tactics.
I think this is a great move. Furthermore it will speed up the process of getting the street thug Darl McBride into a courtroom, get this process over, and get the whole board of SCO up on securities fraud charges where they belong. Maybe the discovery process will even lead to Redmond, who knows?
Well since the article didn't mention anything that sounded like more than a science fair project I went directly to research.microsoft.com. What I found there didn't look much different than it did 2 years ago. In particular I looked at the "Social Computing Group" because I had paid particular attention to that on my last visit. Last thing they published was in 2002, last thing before that was 2001, followed by a series of things in 2000, 1999, back to 1995.
It looks like there are about half as many people as before, however they had individual web pages before, and most of them looked pretty much abandoned, now there are no personal web pages.
They talk about work they did in the distant past using Comic Chat and V-Chat as well as something called Hutchworld, but all of this was there and past-tense when I checked it more than a year ago.
So in this area of 3D Virtual reality interactions they are basically doing nothing. Their research department is for-show-only. If they are doing any fundamental scientific research, or even true research in algorithm theory I'd like to hear about it.
I don't personally care whether they do research or not, but I hate when they are compared with other companies that actually DO research as though they are in the same category. I'd put them in the same category as Radio Shack maybe.
At least they are using their own products these days, click around the site too much and you get things like this: Microsoft OLE DB Provider for ODBC Drivers error '80004005'
[Microsoft][ODBC Driver Manager] Data source name not found and no default driver specified/scripts/people/gogroup.asp, line 14
"For now, that is. China has massive potential, and some day in the not too distant future the US CPU industry could be eating their dust. This event is not to be shrugged off lightly. It should be viewed as a call to arms by US chip developers. If they instead fall asleep at the wheel, things could end up quite ugly for them."
Finally! After 200 off topic left vs right messages someone gets the bigger picture.
Two more things that make this more than just another AMD nuisance for Intel. The Chinese will be integrating these into complete PCs by the millions, and their target will be lower price machines, not faster ones. Intel can wear AMD down in the race to make chips both faster and at a (relatively) lower cost, the final consumer machine based on these things will be phenomenally cheap.
Will American consumers turn down complete PCs for $100 or so just because they don't say "Intel Inside"? I don't think so.
If we want to keep any part of the PC hardware industry here in the US we had better start thinking more about cost. The end-user PC should be a dirt cheap device by now. Make bigger margins on servers, no problem, but for the end user, a toaster sized box with little or nothing left to add for $100 or so is all you need. Of course there is still one outrageously priced component of the typical end-user PC that I haven't mentioned that is going to have to drastically change (hint: not the monitor either).
The other interesting questions is: What will these machines do to the DRM concept if they are readily available world-wide? Lets see, should I get the expensive DRM limited machine with the bloated operating system, or should I "settle" for this cheap import with the slick new operating system and no limits on what I can do? Decisions, decisions...
"There will be a tremedous job loss, and it will be lost jobs for the poorest and least-educated people."
That would explain my total inability to communicate with them. They can't say my name right even after I've pronounced it for them. If I were to ever buy anything as a result of such a call I have no confidence that they would get the order right or ship it to the right place.
I used to consult to one of these companies and they used college kids a lot. It was an almost 24-hour a day operation so they could work with all sorts of schedules. They didn't pay well from what I heard and they had some turnover, but the callers were literate.
Producing full employment will always be a tricky problem to solve. If the solution is make-work though, I would hope some more useful activity can be found.
And don't forget the tablet PC, get everyone to abandon typing and go back to slower, harder to read handwriting. Oh, and pay through the nose for a broken laptop and a "new" operating system to go with it.
Morse code sounds like the logical step "forward" to me.
Thinking back to Monty Python...
Is there a Smoke Signal version of Windows in the works you think?
"Can you use a Linux system successfully in a Windows-dominated environment? That's what SuSE's Linux Desktop is designed to facilitate. We find that you can, although there are plenty of glitches to iron out."
Thats the article summary. Linux doesn't inter-operate with Windows perfectly just like Windows didn't inter-operate with the TSO editor and job-streams written in IBM's JCL language. So what?
For Linux to succeed it doesn't have to be perfect, and it certainly doesn't have to inter-operate with Window perfectly. Anyone who EXPECTS it to do that has simply made up their minds to continue using Windows already and is doing the "test" to satisfy the requirement that they do some sort of comparison shopping.
Nobody in the Open Source movement will be satisfied with Linux being adopted for any other reason than that it is the best choice. It's hard to imagin how it can be both the best choice and 100 percent compatible with Windows at the same time.
If there were nothing wrong with Windows there would be no Linux in the first place.
I don't think the article is saying "don't switch" they are just saying "it will involve some work". But we all kinda know that. Small shops or small departments switching will be a lot easier. For now, the most important switchers are individuals. As the number of people using Linux at home grows the argument at the office will get easier. Thats the way it happened with Windows too.
"Microsoft ultimately might become a prisoner of the industry it helped create. Much like IBM, the earlier leader in computing that Microsoft trumped in the 1980s, Microsoft's fate might be as tied to personal computers as IBM's was tied to mainframes."
Good article up to the last paragraph. Microsoft should strive to be much more like IBM, but it has waited far to long to start. IBM has a huge patent portfolio which they have been a lot more judicious in enforcing than SCO for example. They are also better diversified into the "service" sector. Microsoft has a consulting division, but they are only geared toward helping to sell Microsoft solutions, they quickly show themselves to be nothing more than technical sales reps.
Microsoft has put it's name on mice and keyboards. Very clever, but they don't make anything. Behind IBM's outsourced hardware is a still viable manufacturing and fabrication operation (again, more fundamental research going on here). You might think of IBM as Microsoft, Dell, and Intel all rolled into one. Each of these companies can succeed or fail based on one or two key product lines. IBM became a true corporation a long time ago. Dell and Microsoft are still the product of individuals, with all the strengths and weaknesses of that approach.
Not to be outdone by Gartner and Ziff Davis, I think top management at IBM should take a good bit of the credit for the success of Microsoft and Windows.
Lou Gerstner, I believe, in his autobiography takes credit for calling off the battle against Windows. I remember the day I decided to stop using OS/2, not as a result of any technical setback (of which there were a few) but because I read a letter from one of the executives at IBM acknowledging that OS/2 could not compete against Windows NT. Furthermore, "IBM" had concluded that there was a good chance that future mainframe operating systems would probably be based on some variation of Windows! As a result by edict all future IBM software would be developed FIRST for Windows and then, eventually for OS/2 to honor their earlier commitment not to abandon OS/2. It was pretty clear that was exactly what they planned to do though as soon as a sufficient number of customers had migrated.
Hard to examine the road not taken. Gerstner brags that his vision saved the company from throwing a lot of money down the OS/2 sinkhole, on the other hand the potential pay-off for OS/2 to even have achieved parity with Windows could have been tremendous.
At about this same time if I recall correctly Zachmann made some interesting predictions (I think it was Zachmann anyway). He predicted that Microsoft stock would begind to flatten, and then lose value. That Microsoft would have trouble diversifying into other areas, that employee stock options would lose the ability to attract top talent, and that in total, the mythology that had built up around Microsoft would start to recede. As far as I can tell he was right on every count, but 5 or more years too early.
As someone else pointed out, many of the readers of Slashdot are too young to have experienced these things and so they fully buy into the myth that Windows revolutionized computing and that somehow Microsoft participated in developing the PC (I enjoy asking these youths for details on this to see what outrageous things their imaginations have concocted).
I don't agree that history will settle on these fallacies though. There is way to much recorded evidence of what actually happened. History will get it right and the last 10 years or so will be recorded as an orgy of re-branding and wheel re-invention. Almost every week I see an example of this. Last week, an article on ordered-seek queuing on PC hard disks failed to mention that mainframes of the 70's were doing this in a much more sophisticated way than even todays PCs do. Today, someone called me about a "new" virtual tape technology they had purchased that archived old files to disk based cache and then to tape so that they could be transparently recalled. Again, something we were doing with mainframes in the 70's.
"I quite like the idea of non-transferable patents, but think it's unfair cos an inventor is not necessarily a businessman, so why shouldn't he or she cash in by selling the rights?"
Unfortunately most of the time the inventor is working for a company or university that gets the rights to his invention automatically and in some cases, considering the expense associated with some inventions, this is probably fair.
But you're right, the guy who invents some new thing in his/her basement should have the right to sell it to a company to develop it. Furthermore they should have the right to sign revocable agreements with manufacturing companies so that the invention can be taken somewhere else if the first company he/she deals with defaults in some way.
The more important target of my remarks were companies who buy patents specifically to take the idea out of the marketplace (because it competes with something they already sell) or who (for that same reason) patent something but then don't develop it at all. These types of actions totally go against the rationale behind the original patent laws.
I'd further speculate that they not only do harm to the public, but also to the companies who employ them. Of course it is hard to prove the error in a path not taken. Bean counters in large companies who bottle up patents can smugly advertise their wisdom on whatever basis they choose. By the time the weight of evidence has turned against them the patents have expired, and they have retired.
I realize your didn't ask my opinion, but here's some things you might want to consider."
No, I didn't mean to single anyone out. I just thought Matrix272's post was a good place to hop into the mix.
You're absolutely right about the Libertarians being of two (at least) kinds. If you did Venn diagrams of the three parties there would be a lot of overlaps I'm sure.
In a way, using the classical definition of Liberal, I guess the Libertarians "official" position on things would pretty much be it.
One year I was considering voting Libertarian, so I tuned into their convention on CSPAN. It was very much unlike the other parties conventions in that it was much less formal and they were all in a large room having an audience participation debate. They weren't debating on taxes, or military spending, or health care or anything like that. I guess you could say they were debating "gun control", but really they were debating whether there should be laws prohibiting individuals to own nuclear weapons. It didn't take me long to realize that I wanted to stick with the two major parties for a few more years at least.
While I agree with many many of the Libertarian positions I'd still classify them (using the more accurate Monty Python political terminology) as the Loony party.
Better get them quick... The way the RIAA and our geniuses in Congress think you never can tell whether this might prompt them to extend copyright protection to 600 years!
Oh, and you had better stash away all those other "unauthorized" copies you have too!
Well, if you understand the Libertarian Party so well, puzzle me this:
Libertarians: Eliminate all, or most taxes, eliminate all or most government services, eliminate gun controls and almost all other restrictions on individual actions short of robbery, rape and murder, keep a strong military for defending boarder, but a basically isolationist foreign policy.
Republicans: Reduce taxes, reduce government regulations in many areas, reduce services of the federal government and simplify that which remains, devolve federal power back to states in many areas including most issues of law enforcement, keep a strong military and use it to influence world affairs, but avoid promoting one-world government.
Democrats: Increase taxes, increase federal government programs in all areas except military, make basic life decisions such as smoking and eating habits for its citzens in some areas, but keep hands off in "privacy" areas such as drug use, sexual acts, and pregnancy. Take power away from states so as to standardize laws across the nation. Cut military back to minimum, participate in New World Order activities to allow for further military cutbacks. Make US policies subservient to World Opinion.
Now the Libertarians have what I consider a "purist" almost philosophical approach to government. I don't agree with it totally, but it is at least consistent. The Democrats are all over he board on every issue. Centralizing power, from states, to feds, to UN-like organizations seems to be one thread. Other than that there is no "philosophy" to their approach. The party is built from constituencies that are all single-issue ones that don't care about the big picture anyway.
The Republicans are a compromise between these two extremes. They share a philosophical basis with the Libertarians, but they also realize the practical necessity for some government control where individual action can't be counted on.
And yet, I know a lot of Democrats who say they would much rather vote for a Libertarian candidate that those "damned Republicans". I've never been able to figure it out, other than the fact that most of my Democratic friends don't read the news or watch it on TV beyond the sports section. They don't pay much attention to any of the parties core beleifs, but instead rely on their emotions that tell them that the Democrats "care" about people, the Republicans don't and the Libertarians... Uh, they must be somewhere in-between.
Glad you said this. It would have taken me 3 pages to rant out the same concept.
As soon as a copyright or patent becomes just an asset on a balance sheet I have a problem with it. Companies buy patents to prevent anyone else from using them. They donate patents to universities at outrageous valuations to get tax write-offs, and like SCO, they use them to blackmail other companies.
The purpose of patent and copywright law is to encourage innovation. But why innovate when you can play the game like it is the stock market... buying, selling and litigating over technology that your company neither uses or understands?
It's easy to understand if you think about it: Patents are good when they reward innovation, they are bad when they punish or limit innovation, regardless of what companies are involved. Seems pretty easy to me.
I've noticed about 95% of the keyboards I've tried have that problem. Unfortunately it is not something you can easily test in the store. I think it is mostly to do with the internal electronics not being able to deal with multiple keys being held down at once. By the time you type that "C" you may not have fully let up on the "F" or the "U". My Dell KB worked great till I wore it out, now I'm using an HP KB from an old machine. Several that I bought separately had this "rollover" limitation though. Unfortunately it is not something you notice right away, and you tend to think "It will be better as soon as I get used to this keyboard", but it doesn't work that way.
Let the buyer beware. (And yes, the relatively expensive Microsoft KBs suck about as badly as the cheap ones do. Par for the course).
Don't most game oriented e-zines plug the games they review? Just like CNet has never seen a cell phone they don't like lately.
I happen to be a Second Life user though, and I highly recommend it.
I was just surprised at how short the article was. I know there have been more informative ones pointed to by Slashdot within the last month or so. I don't think anything beats trying it though.
I've been using it for about a year (as a beta tester). Here is what I like about it:
(1) Open ended... No preconceived "objective". For this reason I hate calling it a "game", but since each user is free to script away, quite a few in-world games exist already. The alien abduction thing is a user invention in fact.
(2) Hi Rez textures... I don't know if there is an upper limit, but I've uploaded some fairly hi resolution textures and they render fully. Of course you can slow things down overdoing this, but for some objects you don't want them looking cartoonish.
(3) I should have put this first... LINUX and OS X support comming later this year. I wouldn't fault them if this slips a bit, but they have a definite commitment to other platforms. Delivery schedule for the current system ran ahead of their projections, so, I'm crossing my fingers to be able to run this without re-booting to Windows soon.
(4) Great user community. This might have to do with the screening they did for the beta, we'll see.
(5) Havoc physics engine... everything you create can (optionally) have full physics enabled, do you can make bouncing balls, wheels that spin, etc.
I may be setting up a website with a much more extensive review. For the time being my journal entry has some other info and I'll answer questions there (or here until it expires).
If you use my link to sign up I'll get $3000 in-world. All click-throughs appreciated!! If it is any indication, 5 people have clicked through to the trial via my link and so far and 4 of them signed up.
Slashdot Mirror
Is the chance that yet another critical system somewhere was running and un-patched Windows network.
:)
Maybe terrorists infiltrated Microsoft a long time ago and thats why they suck so much now
Or it could be the hot weather.
Go back and do a 5 year comparison and Red Hat looks much better with the exception of the recent publicity stunt (and a run-up prior to it that I'm sure the SEC will be taking a look at.)
Also consider the total amount invested in each company... 126 million for SCOX more than a billion for Red Hat.
"Maybe I shouldn't care... and in reality it isn't going to make a difference in my day whether they sell those boxes or not. It just bothers me that Linux is being portrayed this way to the general public. My message to the people who run Fry's Electronics (and any other outlet who may sell Linux PCs) is simple: If you are going to sell Linux boxes, please educate your staff on the subject, rather than allowing them to sound ignorant in front of your customers. It is an embarrassment to you as much as it is to the Linux community. Since you are selling Linux boxes, please make sure that they are set with a language appropriate to your locale. If your local to France, sell a French 'speaking' machine. It's that simple. One last thing: Load a distribution that is consumer friendly. This should have been consideration number one, but since you missed it entirely, I'm pointing it out now."
I agree with this, but I also realize that the people in these stores are not computer experts of ANY kind. They can't answer questions about Windows either, although they are more inclined to react to Windows questions with something out of their own experience.
One of the biggest problems with Windows right now in fact is that there is so little DEFINITIVE reference material on it from a users point of view. Microsoft stopped documenting anything beyond the APIs a long time ago and now everything your read about Windows is speculation. Diagnosing Windows problems has gotten to be a voodoo art more than a well defined process. All the more reason for it to wind up in the sh*t can of history where it belongs.
As far as the bad version of Linux this thing is running, I bet the hardware AND software came bundled to Fry's from China at a super bargain price.
On the other hand, if my intention was to buy a cheap machine to run Linux on, I'd feel a lot better about getting one of these than one of the cheap Windows machines. Chances are the cheap Linux machine has more generic components that will operate with ANY version of Linux, while the Windows machines are more likely to include some proprietary component to make you either dependent on the manufacturer, Microsoft, or both.
If I were in the market for a laptop right now I'd probably get one of those $700 Lindows version and then install Debian on it. I bet it would work just fine.
I really don't think the Slashdotter attention span is any different (or if different, it is longer) than the average Internet user.
When articles appear on the first page, they get attention, as they scroll to the bottom they get less, as they move to background pages they get significant;y less.
While I often look beyond the front page, I am less likely to delve into the articles or discussions there, since almost everything that needs to be said HAS been said by then.
I've carried on conversations with people regarding Slashdot articles long after the article appears. This can take place in journal entries or via e-mail where the discussion material can be easily kept as opposed to Slashdot comments which ultimately disappear anyway.
The fact that people don't continue to click on the original source URLs doesn't mean anything.
From http://www.freemikehawash.org/ "On April 28, the day before Mike would have been ordered released, the U.S. Justice Department issued a Complaint, charging Mike with Conspiracy to Levy War on the United States. Mike is being targeted because he is a Muslim. The Justice Department has organized a smear campaign to portray him as a radical."
From Warblogging (a blog about making war against Republicans apparently): "I urge you to write letters to the editors of your local newspapers. Call your senators, call your congressmen. Call into your local radio talk shows. Make a fuss. Tell everyone who will listen about Mike Hawash. He deserves it, and so does the next one who will be dragged into this Kafka-esque nightmare."
From Wired: Ex-Intel VP Fights for Detainee
Oh, let's not forget the ever-accurate New York Times: Terrorism Task Force Detains an American Without Charges
If you browse around and read other articles on many of the private publications that spoke out on this you find constant Bush bashing, comparisons of Republicans to Nazis, an much worse. Liberals figured that this successful natuaralized American of 17 years had a good chance of actually being innocent, so what better way to give the Bush administration grief.
What I don't understand is, why don't the Liberals actually wait till they have some solid information before they bash away? Time after time they just make themselves look like air-heads on things like this.
Here is a clue: What MOTIVE would the current administration or any administration have for falsely arresting anyone on terrorism charges? This notion that the administration hates Arabs just doesn't hold water. They arrested these people because they HAD something on them. Does that mean that every single one will be found guilty? No. But if I let party politics rule my every decision as most of these people seem to do, I think I'd WAIT till one of the innocents had been let go to start my smear campaign. A lot less erroneous web pages to clean up that way. (4000 hits on google to web content proclaiming this guy's innocence).
Bad service, bait and switch, high prices, and
THIS
which sounded at least as bad as what is happening to them.
I have no use for RIM. However a group of my friends convinced me to get the RIM pagers when they were bundled with Yahoo Instant Messaging a couple years ago. The pagers themselves were still outrageously expensive considering what they did. The service itself was spotty at best I spent more time twisting and turning and moving from one spot to another to actually receive a signal and about 1 message in 3 that I sent actually got anywhere. Since the monthly price for the service was better with the Yahoo version than with the standard RIM service (about a third I think) we all put up with the shoddy service.
But after only 6 months, RIM pre-announced that they would not be continuing their deal with Yahoo, and that our only option would be to discontinue the service or convert to the much more expensive RIM service (which actually didn't even have instant messaging at all!) This was a pure bait and switch deal as far as I was concerned.
The combination of 802.11 devices coming down in price as well as initiatives such as Verizon's putting wireless hot-spots at all the phone booths will obsolete this technology real fast.
If this puts them out of business, good riddance!
(Who ever said I don't hold a grudge?)
Mod parent up to (Score:6, right on target!)
This is exactly the same double-speak that allows some people to equate open source with communism.
In any system of government that did not include at least some element of capitalism, open source would not be allowed to exist. There would be one operating system deemed best for everyone.
Don't make the mistake of confusing the system we have in America with pure capitalism. We aren't even close any more.
"This system is capitalism with baggage. In true capticalism, SCO would never sue anyone because there would be no laws copyrights, IP, etc.. for them to use."
"Capticalism"??? Maybe you have hit on something here... there needs to be a new word for the type of capitalism that SCO is practicing I would vote for "crapitalism", which would be indicative of what the SCO board of directors is full of.
I guess I'm a throwback to the 19th century:
http://www.word-detective.com/back-d.html#its
Red Hat is in a much better position to show that the SCO nuisance lawsuit has hurt it's business. While IBM could eventually do this too in a counter suit, Red Hat suing now can provide injunctive relief against the SCO FUD tactics.
I think this is a great move. Furthermore it will speed up the process of getting the street thug Darl McBride into a courtroom, get this process over, and get the whole board of SCO up on securities fraud charges where they belong. Maybe the discovery process will even lead to Redmond, who knows?
Well since the article didn't mention anything that sounded like more than a science fair project I went directly to research.microsoft.com. What I found there didn't look much different than it did 2 years ago. In particular I looked at the "Social Computing Group" because I had paid particular attention to that on my last visit. Last thing they published was in 2002, last thing before that was 2001, followed by a series of things in 2000, 1999, back to 1995.
/scripts/people/gogroup.asp, line 14
It looks like there are about half as many people as before, however they had individual web pages before, and most of them looked pretty much abandoned, now there are no personal web pages.
They talk about work they did in the distant past using Comic Chat and V-Chat as well as something called Hutchworld, but all of this was there and past-tense when I checked it more than a year ago.
So in this area of 3D Virtual reality interactions they are basically doing nothing. Their research department is for-show-only. If they are doing any fundamental scientific research, or even true research in algorithm theory I'd like to hear about it.
I don't personally care whether they do research or not, but I hate when they are compared with other companies that actually DO research as though they are in the same category. I'd put them in the same category as Radio Shack maybe.
At least they are using their own products these days, click around the site too much and you get things like this:
Microsoft OLE DB Provider for ODBC Drivers error '80004005'
[Microsoft][ODBC Driver Manager] Data source name not found and no default driver specified
"For now, that is. China has massive potential, and some day in the not too distant future the US CPU industry could be eating their dust. This event is not to be shrugged off lightly. It should be viewed as a call to arms by US chip developers. If they instead fall asleep at the wheel, things could end up quite ugly for them."
Finally! After 200 off topic left vs right messages someone gets the bigger picture.
Two more things that make this more than just another AMD nuisance for Intel. The Chinese will be integrating these into complete PCs by the millions, and their target will be lower price machines, not faster ones. Intel can wear AMD down in the race to make chips both faster and at a (relatively) lower cost, the final consumer machine based on these things will be phenomenally cheap.
Will American consumers turn down complete PCs for $100 or so just because they don't say "Intel Inside"? I don't think so.
If we want to keep any part of the PC hardware industry here in the US we had better start thinking more about cost. The end-user PC should be a dirt cheap device by now. Make bigger margins on servers, no problem, but for the end user, a toaster sized box with little or nothing left to add for $100 or so is all you need. Of course there is still one outrageously priced component of the typical end-user PC that I haven't mentioned that is going to have to drastically change (hint: not the monitor either).
The other interesting questions is: What will these machines do to the DRM concept if they are readily available world-wide? Lets see, should I get the expensive DRM limited machine with the bloated operating system, or should I "settle" for this cheap import with the slick new operating system and no limits on what I can do? Decisions, decisions...
"There will be a tremedous job loss, and it will be lost jobs for the poorest and least-educated people."
That would explain my total inability to communicate with them. They can't say my name right even after I've pronounced it for them. If I were to ever buy anything as a result of such a call I have no confidence that they would get the order right or ship it to the right place.
I used to consult to one of these companies and they used college kids a lot. It was an almost 24-hour a day operation so they could work with all sorts of schedules. They didn't pay well from what I heard and they had some turnover, but the callers were literate.
Producing full employment will always be a tricky problem to solve. If the solution is make-work though, I would hope some more useful activity can be found.
And don't forget the tablet PC, get everyone to abandon typing and go back to slower, harder to read handwriting. Oh, and pay through the nose for a broken laptop and a "new" operating system to go with it.
Morse code sounds like the logical step "forward" to me.
Thinking back to Monty Python...
Is there a Smoke Signal version of Windows in the works you think?
"Can you use a Linux system successfully in a Windows-dominated environment? That's what SuSE's Linux Desktop is designed to facilitate. We find that you can, although there are plenty of glitches to iron out."
Thats the article summary. Linux doesn't inter-operate with Windows perfectly just like Windows didn't inter-operate with the TSO editor and job-streams written in IBM's JCL language. So what?
For Linux to succeed it doesn't have to be perfect, and it certainly doesn't have to inter-operate with Window perfectly. Anyone who EXPECTS it to do that has simply made up their minds to continue using Windows already and is doing the "test" to satisfy the requirement that they do some sort of comparison shopping.
Nobody in the Open Source movement will be satisfied with Linux being adopted for any other reason than that it is the best choice. It's hard to imagin how it can be both the best choice and 100 percent compatible with Windows at the same time.
If there were nothing wrong with Windows there would be no Linux in the first place.
I don't think the article is saying "don't switch" they are just saying "it will involve some work". But we all kinda know that. Small shops or small departments switching will be a lot easier. For now, the most important switchers are individuals. As the number of people using Linux at home grows the argument at the office will get easier. Thats the way it happened with Windows too.
Good article up to the last paragraph. Microsoft should strive to be much more like IBM, but it has waited far to long to start. IBM has a huge patent portfolio which they have been a lot more judicious in enforcing than SCO for example. They are also better diversified into the "service" sector. Microsoft has a consulting division, but they are only geared toward helping to sell Microsoft solutions, they quickly show themselves to be nothing more than technical sales reps.
Microsoft has put it's name on mice and keyboards. Very clever, but they don't make anything. Behind IBM's outsourced hardware is a still viable manufacturing and fabrication operation (again, more fundamental research going on here). You might think of IBM as Microsoft, Dell, and Intel all rolled into one. Each of these companies can succeed or fail based on one or two key product lines. IBM became a true corporation a long time ago. Dell and Microsoft are still the product of individuals, with all the strengths and weaknesses of that approach.
Not to be outdone by Gartner and Ziff Davis, I think top management at IBM should take a good bit of the credit for the success of Microsoft and Windows.
Lou Gerstner, I believe, in his autobiography takes credit for calling off the battle against Windows. I remember the day I decided to stop using OS/2, not as a result of any technical setback (of which there were a few) but because I read a letter from one of the executives at IBM acknowledging that OS/2 could not compete against Windows NT. Furthermore, "IBM" had concluded that there was a good chance that future mainframe operating systems would probably be based on some variation of Windows! As a result by edict all future IBM software would be developed FIRST for Windows and then, eventually for OS/2 to honor their earlier commitment not to abandon OS/2. It was pretty clear that was exactly what they planned to do though as soon as a sufficient number of customers had migrated.
Hard to examine the road not taken. Gerstner brags that his vision saved the company from throwing a lot of money down the OS/2 sinkhole, on the other hand the potential pay-off for OS/2 to even have achieved parity with Windows could have been tremendous.
At about this same time if I recall correctly Zachmann made some interesting predictions (I think it was Zachmann anyway). He predicted that Microsoft stock would begind to flatten, and then lose value. That Microsoft would have trouble diversifying into other areas, that employee stock options would lose the ability to attract top talent, and that in total, the mythology that had built up around Microsoft would start to recede. As far as I can tell he was right on every count, but 5 or more years too early.
As someone else pointed out, many of the readers of Slashdot are too young to have experienced these things and so they fully buy into the myth that Windows revolutionized computing and that somehow Microsoft participated in developing the PC (I enjoy asking these youths for details on this to see what outrageous things their imaginations have concocted).
I don't agree that history will settle on these fallacies though. There is way to much recorded evidence of what actually happened. History will get it right and the last 10 years or so will be recorded as an orgy of re-branding and wheel re-invention. Almost every week I see an example of this. Last week, an article on ordered-seek queuing on PC hard disks failed to mention that mainframes of the 70's were doing this in a much more sophisticated way than even todays PCs do. Today, someone called me about a "new" virtual tape technology they had purchased that archived old files to disk based cache and then to tape so that they could be transparently recalled. Again, something we were doing with mainframes in the 70's.
Unfortunately most of the time the inventor is working for a company or university that gets the rights to his invention automatically and in some cases, considering the expense associated with some inventions, this is probably fair.
But you're right, the guy who invents some new thing in his/her basement should have the right to sell it to a company to develop it. Furthermore they should have the right to sign revocable agreements with manufacturing companies so that the invention can be taken somewhere else if the first company he/she deals with defaults in some way.
The more important target of my remarks were companies who buy patents specifically to take the idea out of the marketplace (because it competes with something they already sell) or who (for that same reason) patent something but then don't develop it at all. These types of actions totally go against the rationale behind the original patent laws.
I'd further speculate that they not only do harm to the public, but also to the companies who employ them. Of course it is hard to prove the error in a path not taken. Bean counters in large companies who bottle up patents can smugly advertise their wisdom on whatever basis they choose. By the time the weight of evidence has turned against them the patents have expired, and they have retired.
No, I didn't mean to single anyone out. I just thought Matrix272's post was a good place to hop into the mix.
You're absolutely right about the Libertarians being of two (at least) kinds. If you did Venn diagrams of the three parties there would be a lot of overlaps I'm sure.
In a way, using the classical definition of Liberal, I guess the Libertarians "official" position on things would pretty much be it.
One year I was considering voting Libertarian, so I tuned into their convention on CSPAN. It was very much unlike the other parties conventions in that it was much less formal and they were all in a large room having an audience participation debate. They weren't debating on taxes, or military spending, or health care or anything like that. I guess you could say they were debating "gun control", but really they were debating whether there should be laws prohibiting individuals to own nuclear weapons. It didn't take me long to realize that I wanted to stick with the two major parties for a few more years at least.
While I agree with many many of the Libertarian positions I'd still classify them (using the more accurate Monty Python political terminology) as the Loony party.
Better get them quick... The way the RIAA and our geniuses in Congress think you never can tell whether this might prompt them to extend copyright protection to 600 years!
Oh, and you had better stash away all those other "unauthorized" copies you have too!
Well, if you understand the Libertarian Party so well, puzzle me this:
Libertarians: Eliminate all, or most taxes, eliminate all or most government services, eliminate gun controls and almost all other restrictions on individual actions short of robbery, rape and murder, keep a strong military for defending boarder, but a basically isolationist foreign policy.
Republicans: Reduce taxes, reduce government regulations in many areas, reduce services of the federal government and simplify that which remains, devolve federal power back to states in many areas including most issues of law enforcement, keep a strong military and use it to influence world affairs, but avoid promoting one-world government.
Democrats: Increase taxes, increase federal government programs in all areas except military, make basic life decisions such as smoking and eating habits for its citzens in some areas, but keep hands off in "privacy" areas such as drug use, sexual acts, and pregnancy. Take power away from states so as to standardize laws across the nation. Cut military back to minimum, participate in New World Order activities to allow for further military cutbacks. Make US policies subservient to World Opinion.
Now the Libertarians have what I consider a "purist" almost philosophical approach to government. I don't agree with it totally, but it is at least consistent. The Democrats are all over he board on every issue. Centralizing power, from states, to feds, to UN-like organizations seems to be one thread. Other than that there is no "philosophy" to their approach. The party is built from constituencies that are all single-issue ones that don't care about the big picture anyway.
The Republicans are a compromise between these two extremes. They share a philosophical basis with the Libertarians, but they also realize the practical necessity for some government control where individual action can't be counted on.
And yet, I know a lot of Democrats who say they would much rather vote for a Libertarian candidate that those "damned Republicans". I've never been able to figure it out, other than the fact that most of my Democratic friends don't read the news or watch it on TV beyond the sports section. They don't pay much attention to any of the parties core beleifs, but instead rely on their emotions that tell them that the Democrats "care" about people, the Republicans don't and the Libertarians... Uh, they must be somewhere in-between.
Have I got it right?
Glad you said this. It would have taken me 3 pages to rant out the same concept.
As soon as a copyright or patent becomes just an asset on a balance sheet I have a problem with it. Companies buy patents to prevent anyone else from using them. They donate patents to universities at outrageous valuations to get tax write-offs, and like SCO, they use them to blackmail other companies.
The purpose of patent and copywright law is to encourage innovation. But why innovate when you can play the game like it is the stock market... buying, selling and litigating over technology that your company neither uses or understands?
It's easy to understand if you think about it: Patents are good when they reward innovation, they are bad when they punish or limit innovation, regardless of what companies are involved. Seems pretty easy to me.
I've noticed about 95% of the keyboards I've tried have that problem. Unfortunately it is not something you can easily test in the store. I think it is mostly to do with the internal electronics not being able to deal with multiple keys being held down at once. By the time you type that "C" you may not have fully let up on the "F" or the "U". My Dell KB worked great till I wore it out, now I'm using an HP KB from an old machine. Several that I bought separately had this "rollover" limitation though. Unfortunately it is not something you notice right away, and you tend to think "It will be better as soon as I get used to this keyboard", but it doesn't work that way.
Let the buyer beware. (And yes, the relatively expensive Microsoft KBs suck about as badly as the cheap ones do. Par for the course).
Don't most game oriented e-zines plug the games they review? Just like CNet has never seen a cell phone they don't like lately.
I happen to be a Second Life user though, and I highly recommend it.
I was just surprised at how short the article was. I know there have been more informative ones pointed to by Slashdot within the last month or so. I don't think anything beats trying it though.
I've been using it for about a year (as a beta tester). Here is what I like about it:
(1) Open ended... No preconceived "objective". For this reason I hate calling it a "game", but since each user is free to script away, quite a few in-world games exist already. The alien abduction thing is a user invention in fact.
(2) Hi Rez textures... I don't know if there is an upper limit, but I've uploaded some fairly hi resolution textures and they render fully. Of course you can slow things down overdoing this, but for some objects you don't want them looking cartoonish.
(3) I should have put this first... LINUX and OS X support comming later this year. I wouldn't fault them if this slips a bit, but they have a definite commitment to other platforms. Delivery schedule for the current system ran ahead of their projections, so, I'm crossing my fingers to be able to run this without re-booting to Windows soon.
(4) Great user community. This might have to do with the screening they did for the beta, we'll see.
(5) Havoc physics engine... everything you create can (optionally) have full physics enabled, do you can make bouncing balls, wheels that spin, etc.
I may be setting up a website with a much more extensive review. For the time being my journal entry has some other info and I'll answer questions there (or here until it expires).
If you use my link to sign up I'll get $3000 in-world. All click-throughs appreciated!! If it is any indication, 5 people have clicked through to the trial via my link and so far and 4 of them signed up.