Every one is squabbling over MS including this or that...I'd say let them. It will only hurry their demise. The more people they cut out of the desktop PC biz, the more they become like Apple, very profitable, but limited, exclusive, and erratic. Like you said, let them keep locking out developers...eventually there'll be enough critical mass to start something new. Everyone that wants "their own" stuff will go some where else.
At this point, giving MS what it "wants" will only hurt it faster...because the management really doesn't get it. We need to get the govts to limit MS buying up stuff and destroying other industries rather than worring about PCs...that and keep them from passing the dreaded laws to protect their dead business model!
Yeah, that's why they go for tall skinny guys. Of course it's not a bad way to go....smothered by large, soft jubblies in your sleep. That's the risk some people take just to have a girlfriend.
Oh, and until then you gotta be really nice to them...or they'll beat you up [they have to lift more than you weigh just to roll over]...but/.er are already conditioned for that anyway...ha.
That's how MS maintains it's monopoly, by buying up everything anything that looks like it might be competition. They buy litterally dozens of small companies every year...Look at recent aquisitions: Rare, Virtual PC, that russian AV company, etc. They're not just buying into an industry anymore, they're buying tools that the competition uses [other consoles, AltOS virtualization, and AltOS AntiVirus] in order to hurt them. That's abuse of their warchest, and it needs to stop.
The game MS is playing is that the FTC can't keep up with MS monopoly plans in order to slow them down. They're a declared monopoly, but still allowed to funnel those funds into creating new monopolies! The only effetive way to stop MS is to cut them off. They can't actually engineer new products to save their butts...most new features even in Windows or Office are Bought not developed in-house.
Also, it's still somewhat fair competition. Basicly, MS has lost the right to play ball for a while and should sit in the penalty box while the other companies catch up. [just like in sports] It still requires companies to develop products and compete...it just removes the 800 lb Gorilla from being a threat...and maybe will let a couple new 500 lb Gorillas grow up so when MS is out of the penalty box, they can't just "buy their way" back in...no matter how much money they have. on a side note, cutting MS off from using capital as a business weapon puts that cash pile at the mercy of the wall street sharks that rewarded it's abusive business practices in the first place. Once MS can't "Grow" at 20%+ per year, the sharks will want all that money $$$ in their pockets as dividends...allowing MS own practices and expectations to kill it from the inside!
First of all, she tests software on only 1 or 2 pcs...that she's had for at least 2 years! If a OS doesn't work out-of-the-box on what would have been an adverage/. geek machine 1.5-2 years ago, why did they waste her time? If it's supposed to be based on RedHat, then it should have worked well...she gave RedHat 9 a pretty good review [of course she picked at the GUI, but that's just Eugenia]
By trade, she's a GUI designer...so she's a bit of a GUNazi...but that's just her. Also, RedHat yanked the carpet out from everyone. If this "replacement" isn't up to snuff, why should she bother babying it? If it's not AS GOOD AS RedHat, then why bother with it?
She reviews a lot of AltOSes at her site. Like I said above, her demo machines aren't secret, or goofy in any way...they were built with hardware picked specifically to run BeOS after all! She expect to pop the disk in the machine and go. That's the standard for something "professional" She grills most things she reviews like this, but these are REALLY SIMPLE things for the most part...they should be done right if you want people to use your distro!
She is mindful of the politics involved with OSS too. She's more than willing to Hype anything...far more than/. But she's got high expectations...like most normal users do. After reading her review, she's right on...when standard programs [included working with other distros!] won't install properly, they've got a serious problem. She's put the work into learning about RH8 & 9, and even tried workarounds for both and bug reports that are still hapening! That's above and beyond any normal user experience, and more than fair! And again, it carries the RedHat name...but not very well. Especially if it's expected to be a reflection of the enterprise version..[that political side again]
There always has to be a 'first' one! I'm sure They have blueprints, software code, ect., but often the little 'tweaks' that made it WORK are unique to that machine...often even engineers stumble upon a solution and have to figure out WHY they got it working! Without the hardware they're set back months.
For $1.5m it must have been a mini-uav, not a fullsize heilo. That would make it farily portable with a normal 2.5 ton truck. As far as security, normally a locked building would suffice...a $1 million dollar project is still mostly a hobby project...with most of the money wrapped up in developlment. Like another poster said, there are lots of companies working on this concept, but very few have their level of working product. It's the difference between mearly building a bot to solve the inverted pendulum problem and prototyping a segway...getting a few extra 9's of reliablity is the WORK part of innovation, not a magic bullet.
seriously, Remember that their police worry about suicide bombers not petty robbers, and if someone is willing to knock down walls... Before you complain about security, look at/.! if billy g wanted he could pay a group of para militaries with crowbars to shut taco's servers down [firewall meet sledgehammer!]...is VALinux perpared for such an event? Not really, stuff like that doesn't happen that much here...it's fairly extreme. And most hosting facilities are either out-of-the-way or in industrial areas where the noise wouldn't be heard and cops have more pressing things to do...Look at the repo man business...we're not really very safe are we?
Considering the way the US Govt takes no shame in using the net to undermine legitimate, law abiding governments [hey, being evil isn't against international laws! Unfortunately.] I can see why many countries would have an issue with this. It's not a problem here in the US because we have so much Media that it completely drowns out much of the fringe speech from our daily lives. But in smaller countries, the US is known to, even admits to using the internet to reenforce what they would consider terrorists, and other malcontents to make the smaller govts look bad. I could see many countries wanting out from under that "thumb".
On the other hand, it's US companies that are paving the way with open arms!!! That is the bigger news here! We value free speech right up until someone pays us to take it away from those they don't like..that is truly sad. There oughta be a law against it, US companies contributing to blocking of free speech. But if they were TRULY AMERICANS THEY WOULDN'T DO IT AT ALL!
Yes, it looks like a lot of money, but not really...people say that about all low wage workers that rake it in! You figure that a SkyCap [used to] take your bags from the curb to the check-in desk, usually get you a good spot in line, and do it quickly and efficently. If it took 10 minutes of his time, but saved 30 minutes of yours [+ fustration of forgeting something] Then he made YOU 3x as efficent in your travels! Now if you make even $15/hour and tip 7.50 then you are breaking even for your time, but he's getting $7.50+ by 6 visits per hour which is $45/hour just for lending a hand...but it's definately not "overpaid" it is in fact an economic gain for both parties...now imagine a $500/hour CEO and you can see why they get big tips for "menial" work.
Piloting also takes a great deal of money...similar to being a doctor. Realize that every Certification requires 50-100 hours of practice and/or instruction at $75/hr on thru the roof! To even qualify to fly a single engine cesena at noon on a sunny day costs $5k- $10K in training expenses...You have to work thru 10-12 ratings to get anywhere near what a company would pay you for. That puts being a pilot up there [or maybe over] in cost with being a doctor. As well as the time to get there...you'd have to be professionally flying almost 10 years to get in at a major airline...or spend your time making less that it costs to keep up your education.
It's not a very good business prop, even for being "overpaid".
In midrange and big iron boxes, each subsystem is its own self contained unit that "talks" to the others....not controlled by them.
I work with IBM iSeries, and it's the little things that count! In and idle box, the CPU literally does NOTHING. Not 2-3%, but 0% overhead. memory is handled by a seperate processor that gets requests as needed. Disk is the same--think SCSI on steroids. Terminal emmulation is seperate, tape backup, etc... The idea is that all the other tasks are "handled" by something else, no IRQ, DMA, I/o addresses to slow things down.
The other key is that big iron is designed around basicly terminal thru-put rather than graphics or multimedia. Again, the chips are ordered to maximize 1000 128kb connections to memory rather than just 1 process with Gb/s of bandwith that stops to wait for keyboard input!
On a moderen PC, windows spends most of its time just waiting...for user input, devices, memory management, etc...waiting that turns a 3GHz processor to about 1GHz of usefulness. I've thought that something like Optereon could make a splash in this area. It's idea of multiple channels is a first step to making PCs more mainframe like. But...that costs money in chipsets...notice the expense of Adaptec UltraSCSI controlers...You'd need them for every system to make a PC perform like at midrange for the same MHz.
That's cruel and unusual, rebooting a mainframe like that, you don't deserve to have it that good. Once a quarter is too often, you'll wear out the power button dude...they don't test those out very well you know.
My point was that you get the pop-ups first thing when you connect to the net! You can't even get to/. to find out about disabling Windows Messanging before you start gettimg them! And yes, disabling Windows messanger was the first thing I did after upgrading to Win2K...but I got pop-ups every 5 minutes while trying to google for the answer...very fustrating.
As for being a Windows AND AOL user on/. AOL was the first company to bring WORKING broadband to my area...sure the cable company promised for about 3 years, and so did the phone company, but every time I answered THEIR adds it wasn't QUITE READY. AOL was the first company to have it available when they advertized it...sad hun...
I happen to like the AOL because they've got the radio and Video channels that pretty much negate the need to seperately search for mp3's or movie trailers...often they get them FIRST. It also removes the need for programs like Kazza just to listen to stuff...and they don't complain about bandwidth usage for [their] media files either. AOL has a content model more ISPs should start following. For instance, an ISP with local sourceforge mirrors could be big for the/. crowd! being able to download isos fast from a local network mirror....but that's now companies become successful, but catering to customers, not blaming them for using the service!
It's really something brought up in the animatrix. the machines were looking to co-exist with humans in the world, and of course created the "ditital jail" for human minds. Agent smith was juust the completion of machine evolution...that he wan't just a program, but a genuine lifeform...with a soul that could inhabit a body.
Of course that made him a threat to both people and machines! He could "reproduce" in the matrix, but live in human bodies in the real world...he was the final evolution of AI...and of course deadly to his ancestors!
It also made sense because of the comments about "choice" and "suffering"...Both traits humans seem to flock to... everything that was said in reloaded pointed to "zion" as being possibly fake...as a method to control those who wanted out by offering another "choice". That people could go back-and-forth?...because they never left...and were still connected at some level.
on the other hand, I'm glad to know it does really end!
Please,/. is mostly ADHD geeks that have no proplem spending 5-6 hours straight playing video games, hammering code, reading techinial books...but often can't remember to match their socks...
Think of it like making a bunch of connected music videos...or like a single issue of a comic book at a time. It's what Gary is good at...after all Dexter and Powerpuf eps are only 12 minute eps...even the venerable Bugs Bunny or RoadRunner are only several minute shorts.
it's a lost art..shorts...one they wanted to try again!
Messanger pop-up service is installed by default for inter-group messaging as part of the OS! I've got AOL at home and was getting them within 60 seconds of login to AOL on my windows 2K box [note: clean install of AOL and windows too]...This is not a bug in IE, it's a feature!
Note: This is the very same service that AOL finally started remote-disabling reported last week. It was really annoying because it came up BEFORE you went to any websites!!!! The messanger service is not tied to a browser but to your IP address...very easy to find a nice big block like AOLs and just spam the list of IPs...ouch.
And those old dudes in 1789 didn't envision freedom of speech on the internet either...What's your point? A well written law accounts for behaviours or protects rights in situations it was never planned on! Or should online-identity theft not be illegal because it was just invented 2 minutes ago...get the idea...
A three year old with a box of lego bricks can 3D model very close repicas...Why can't millons of dollars to developers make things that simple on a computer? Granted, 3D requires different hardware than we have now, but years of learning some program are just crazy...we already KNOW how to 3D model, we just can't put it in a computer easily!
Take away their ability to spend money! It doesn't have to be a fine, just prevent them from buying any other software from anyone...make them write all their own stuff...from scratch! It still makes the other companies work at getting customers, but remove the constant threat of MS buying the cheapest one and giving it away to kill the rest. In a few years MS will have to sign FAIR agreements to get anything to work with them! The market is already tipping..the beauty of the court case it what the market looked like 4 years ago! And remedies can be base accordingly...but extra effective now!
The govt needs to stop trying to treat the symptoms and hit MS where it lives! They should be prohibited from buying any patents, copyrights, programs, companies...anything at all! If they're so big and bad, that shouldn't hurt right? Except they use that Monopoly money to buy up the future competition. I'd say lock them out for 5 years...Unless they are really good, it's a death sentence. neat, clean, and simple!
The standard MS contract says they can't dual-boot removing the best possible option for people to experiment. It's already been tried with Be...but to contest it NOW while court is in session could be a good thing...but wait, you can't talk about it either! so you can't even publish that you TRIED!!!!
A business that finds itself with a monopoly doesn't have the right to such "self protection" contracts! That IS the law. Again, it's a grey thing. You have the right to such clauses right up until you become a monopoly...they all your rights to such clauses go away..evaporate....If only the court could pin this down..
But that was their right...Parts of the contract were posted and basicly, Sun had a "we don't like it clause" just like MS always uses. MS chose not to comply, then not to provide it at all after promising too...even when SUN put their OWN JVM into the ring to replace the MS one they didnt' like...MS refused to do it...get the idea, they just didn't want java once it took off. So they draged their feet and stalled with a crappy not-up-to date version to kill it by uselessness because SUN foiled the 3E strategy.
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At this point, giving MS what it "wants" will only hurt it faster...because the management really doesn't get it. We need to get the govts to limit MS buying up stuff and destroying other industries rather than worring about PCs...that and keep them from passing the dreaded laws to protect their dead business model!
Oh, and until then you gotta be really nice to them...or they'll beat you up [they have to lift more than you weigh just to roll over] ...but /.er are already conditioned for that anyway...ha.
The game MS is playing is that the FTC can't keep up with MS monopoly plans in order to slow them down. They're a declared monopoly, but still allowed to funnel those funds into creating new monopolies! The only effetive way to stop MS is to cut them off. They can't actually engineer new products to save their butts...most new features even in Windows or Office are Bought not developed in-house.
Also, it's still somewhat fair competition. Basicly, MS has lost the right to play ball for a while and should sit in the penalty box while the other companies catch up. [just like in sports] It still requires companies to develop products and compete...it just removes the 800 lb Gorilla from being a threat...and maybe will let a couple new 500 lb Gorillas grow up so when MS is out of the penalty box, they can't just "buy their way" back in...no matter how much money they have. on a side note, cutting MS off from using capital as a business weapon puts that cash pile at the mercy of the wall street sharks that rewarded it's abusive business practices in the first place. Once MS can't "Grow" at 20%+ per year, the sharks will want all that money $$$ in their pockets as dividends...allowing MS own practices and expectations to kill it from the inside!
By trade, she's a GUI designer...so she's a bit of a GUNazi...but that's just her. Also, RedHat yanked the carpet out from everyone. If this "replacement" isn't up to snuff, why should she bother babying it? If it's not AS GOOD AS RedHat, then why bother with it?
She reviews a lot of AltOSes at her site. Like I said above, her demo machines aren't secret, or goofy in any way...they were built with hardware picked specifically to run BeOS after all! She expect to pop the disk in the machine and go. That's the standard for something "professional" She grills most things she reviews like this, but these are REALLY SIMPLE things for the most part...they should be done right if you want people to use your distro!
She is mindful of the politics involved with OSS too. She's more than willing to Hype anything...far more than
For $1.5m it must have been a mini-uav, not a fullsize heilo. That would make it farily portable with a normal 2.5 ton truck. As far as security, normally a locked building would suffice ...a $1 million dollar project is still mostly a hobby project...with most of the money wrapped up in developlment. Like another poster said, there are lots of companies working on this concept, but very few have their level of working product. It's the difference between mearly building a bot to solve the inverted pendulum problem and prototyping a segway...getting a few extra 9's of reliablity is the WORK part of innovation, not a magic bullet.
seriously, Remember that their police worry about suicide bombers not petty robbers, and if someone is willing to knock down walls... Before you complain about security, look at /.! if billy g wanted he could pay a group of para militaries with crowbars to shut taco's servers down [firewall meet sledgehammer!]...is VALinux perpared for such an event? Not really, stuff like that doesn't happen that much here...it's fairly extreme. And most hosting facilities are either out-of-the-way or in industrial areas where the noise wouldn't be heard and cops have more pressing things to do...Look at the repo man business...we're not really very safe are we?
On the other hand, it's US companies that are paving the way with open arms!!! That is the bigger news here! We value free speech right up until someone pays us to take it away from those they don't like..that is truly sad. There oughta be a law against it, US companies contributing to blocking of free speech. But if they were TRULY AMERICANS THEY WOULDN'T DO IT AT ALL!
Yes, it looks like a lot of money, but not really...people say that about all low wage workers that rake it in! You figure that a SkyCap [used to] take your bags from the curb to the check-in desk, usually get you a good spot in line, and do it quickly and efficently. If it took 10 minutes of his time, but saved 30 minutes of yours [+ fustration of forgeting something] Then he made YOU 3x as efficent in your travels! Now if you make even $15/hour and tip 7.50 then you are breaking even for your time, but he's getting $7.50+ by 6 visits per hour which is $45/hour just for lending a hand...but it's definately not "overpaid" it is in fact an economic gain for both parties...now imagine a $500/hour CEO and you can see why they get big tips for "menial" work.
It's not a very good business prop, even for being "overpaid".
That said, I did work 2nd/3rd for a while...great "quality" time with my machine.
I work with IBM iSeries, and it's the little things that count! In and idle box, the CPU literally does NOTHING. Not 2-3%, but 0% overhead. memory is handled by a seperate processor that gets requests as needed. Disk is the same--think SCSI on steroids. Terminal emmulation is seperate, tape backup, etc... The idea is that all the other tasks are "handled" by something else, no IRQ, DMA, I/o addresses to slow things down.
The other key is that big iron is designed around basicly terminal thru-put rather than graphics or multimedia. Again, the chips are ordered to maximize 1000 128kb connections to memory rather than just 1 process with Gb/s of bandwith that stops to wait for keyboard input!
On a moderen PC, windows spends most of its time just waiting...for user input, devices, memory management, etc...waiting that turns a 3GHz processor to about 1GHz of usefulness. I've thought that something like Optereon could make a splash in this area. It's idea of multiple channels is a first step to making PCs more mainframe like. But...that costs money in chipsets...notice the expense of Adaptec UltraSCSI controlers...You'd need them for every system to make a PC perform like at midrange for the same MHz.
That's cruel and unusual, rebooting a mainframe like that, you don't deserve to have it that good. Once a quarter is too often, you'll wear out the power button dude...they don't test those out very well you know.
As for being a Windows AND AOL user on /. AOL was the first company to bring WORKING broadband to my area...sure the cable company promised for about 3 years, and so did the phone company, but every time I answered THEIR adds it wasn't QUITE READY. AOL was the first company to have it available when they advertized it...sad hun...
I happen to like the AOL because they've got the radio and Video channels that pretty much negate the need to seperately search for mp3's or movie trailers...often they get them FIRST. It also removes the need for programs like Kazza just to listen to stuff...and they don't complain about bandwidth usage for [their] media files either. AOL has a content model more ISPs should start following. For instance, an ISP with local sourceforge mirrors could be big for the /. crowd! being able to download isos fast from a local network mirror....but that's now companies become successful, but catering to customers, not blaming them for using the service!
Of course that made him a threat to both people and machines! He could "reproduce" in the matrix, but live in human bodies in the real world...he was the final evolution of AI...and of course deadly to his ancestors!
on the other hand, I'm glad to know it does really end!
Please, /. is mostly ADHD geeks that have no proplem spending 5-6 hours straight playing video games, hammering code, reading techinial books...but often can't remember to match their socks...
This is /. we're not exactly known for being "grown up" here, now are we?
it's a lost art..shorts...one they wanted to try again!
Note: This is the very same service that AOL finally started remote-disabling reported last week. It was really annoying because it came up BEFORE you went to any websites!!!! The messanger service is not tied to a browser but to your IP address...very easy to find a nice big block like AOLs and just spam the list of IPs...ouch.
And those old dudes in 1789 didn't envision freedom of speech on the internet either...What's your point? A well written law accounts for behaviours or protects rights in situations it was never planned on! Or should online-identity theft not be illegal because it was just invented 2 minutes ago...get the idea...
Oh, that and when MSN posts front page links to Linux news!
one more thing...THIS IS SLASHDOT SILLY RABBIT!
A three year old with a box of lego bricks can 3D model very close repicas...Why can't millons of dollars to developers make things that simple on a computer? Granted, 3D requires different hardware than we have now, but years of learning some program are just crazy...we already KNOW how to 3D model, we just can't put it in a computer easily!
Take away their ability to spend money! It doesn't have to be a fine, just prevent them from buying any other software from anyone...make them write all their own stuff...from scratch! It still makes the other companies work at getting customers, but remove the constant threat of MS buying the cheapest one and giving it away to kill the rest. In a few years MS will have to sign FAIR agreements to get anything to work with them! The market is already tipping..the beauty of the court case it what the market looked like 4 years ago! And remedies can be base accordingly...but extra effective now!
The govt needs to stop trying to treat the symptoms and hit MS where it lives! They should be prohibited from buying any patents, copyrights, programs, companies...anything at all! If they're so big and bad, that shouldn't hurt right? Except they use that Monopoly money to buy up the future competition. I'd say lock them out for 5 years...Unless they are really good, it's a death sentence. neat, clean, and simple!
A business that finds itself with a monopoly doesn't have the right to such "self protection" contracts! That IS the law. Again, it's a grey thing. You have the right to such clauses right up until you become a monopoly...they all your rights to such clauses go away..evaporate....If only the court could pin this down..
But that was their right...Parts of the contract were posted and basicly, Sun had a "we don't like it clause" just like MS always uses. MS chose not to comply, then not to provide it at all after promising too...even when SUN put their OWN JVM into the ring to replace the MS one they didnt' like...MS refused to do it...get the idea, they just didn't want java once it took off. So they draged their feet and stalled with a crappy not-up-to date version to kill it by uselessness because SUN foiled the 3E strategy.