the point is that the PAYING customers are still stuck with the same-old closed source product. The "open" version will always have little version differences from the supported version, so troubleshooting YOUR problems as a paying customer still isn't any easier.. for a matter of fact if you were using OpenSolaris developed software (free from the community) on Solaris, you could end up with MORE problems because the free people can't support you. It makes the free version nothing but a parlor trick.
but it's backwards of the Red Hat way. With Fedora, Red Hat lets the community run the roost and run whatever crazy things are cool on the tubes. They reserve RHEL for the cleaned up professional version that has what paying customers NEED and they support it. The community gets the warty version with all the lumps in return for it being free.
Sun wants to treat MySQL like a product. They want to give away the "free" version as a stripped down marketing tool. They want to put new code in Enterprise first, where fewer people will see it. The current model is that Enterprise is MORE stable and less agressive. The value of the GPL version is that lots of people put up with warts because it's free... paying customers won't do that by a long shot. The first time a nasty data killing bug shows up for the top paying customers they'll all jump ship for Sun not testing better.
How are farmers that reuse their seeds each year being compensated for their crops being "polluted" and unsellable by other farmers using "proprietary" seeds? How can farmers that want to practice "old fashioned" farming continue when their livelihood is changed by crops from other farmer's fields thru the normal course of nature and then the lawman comes and says they can't sell them? If farmers want to use GM seeds there needs to be guarantees those genetics stay in their licensed fields. Farmers make their money off the whims of nature, these seeds are no different. Otherwise they should sue for vermin and plague of locust that cross property lines too!
that is EXACTLY what the OOXML vs ODF was really about. If microsoft ever implemented a proper ODF filter or an OOXML that really worked, many departments in government would be legally compelled to purchase some Linux boxes just to try them out as "stand-by" options for due diligence in purchasing. If that ever happened Billy G. would start throwing chairs!
opposed to Microsoft who's already back on the horse making promises about the NEXT version of Windows and how great it will be when we don't have XP SP3 and Vista SP1 had to be recalled. We look forward to having what Vista promised in 2010... maybe.
I predict a powerPC based.Net only B-Box, and Xbox for businesses real soon. It will run only.Net 3.0 programs and only from a locked down terminal server. Companies will Love it. The only thing stopping that is Microsoft's complete inability to update their products to their plans in a timely manner.
but that's how they WANT it to be. Years ago they realized hardware was getting TOO standardized. It's better for Microsoft if they let other people write the drivers just a little different. That keeps the hardware from becoming too much the same and upstart OSes from instantly taking over. I believe there were some articles on/. about that very issue.
Russia has more than enough experience to run a station.... WTF. More parts of ISS are built by them and they log way more manned hours than the US team does. They're much better at extreme repairs under dire conditions than US astronauts also.
Their process is a bit backwards, they have cheap, stable, easy to build large rockets. The only problem is that they are no where near as efficient as US rockets... they can lift Heavy... cheap... exactly what space building requires. Besides if they need robotics or other complex stuff NASA has been laying off for years.. they can borrow somebody cheap.
I agree with that. It's not that some other company will beat Microsoft out, just that people will stop caring. That's what happened to IBM with the PC. The market advanced and nobody cared about IBM doing everything different so they could charge you more. Vista is exactly the same case.
It doesn't help that Microsoft with Xbox and Zune have shot their own multimedia partners in the back. New devices are all about iPod or Linux. Very little tries to play with Windows media anymore as it's irrelevant to the marketplace. Microsoft sabotaged PC gaming to build up Xbox, now normal people don't buy PC games.. they don't need Windows for anything except MS Office in most cases.
In my house I have a dozen devices and only 2 or 3 are Windows. Routers, Network hard drives, Wii, Apple TV, Network printers... all operate outside Windows and happily together. Even consumers are getting tired of DVD burners, photo printers and such tied to buggy windows computers and device makers are making more stand-alone devices that use common or open (i.e. non MS) formats to store data on the network or memory stix. Consider Tivo, Slingbox, & eeePC are all non-microsoft it's already irrelevant to the normal person except as a business tool. I keep one Windows Box for my Wife to do business stuff on, but even for school, I do everything on a Mac or linux box without any Microsoft software. The only thing Windows has is inertia.
In some industries you'd be hard pressed to cut out IBM simply because they have so much built up, If they closed down tomorrow, it would hurt for a few months, but nobody would really care. Microsoft is headed down the same path and they are ill equipped to live in a world to compete on DELIVERY and SERVICE not marketing.
Steve has shown in 5 years that Apple can release more interesting stuff than Microsoft. Apple just "does" it, they don't pre-announce years in advance. Steve just shows up on sage with a fully operational Intel Mac running Apple's software Suite (OSX, iLife, etc) on day 1, or with a fully functioning iPhone that happens to have used OSX, on day 1.
Microsoft bellyaches how "hard" software is to make, and constantly delays (and they don't make computers or phones and sell them) Apple makes it look very easy and investors are starting to see Microsoft isn't really that good at their CORE job.
wrong, even in the US contract don't go 100% to the lowest bidder. There are all sorts of rules about limiting "single source" options. If that wasn't the case IBM would still be a monopoly because they'd under cut the federal contracts to keep the channel locked up. Microsoft is one of the few non-defense companies that can get away with no-bid contracts 100% of the time.
Microsoft clearly broke EU law, just like any other lawbreaker, they will have trouble finding government-sponsored work. This will also help to prop up some other companies to compete with them. Even a small portion of just EU govt sales is larger than all of a company like Mandriva's budget for a few years... the money would be gladly welcome and do everybody a lot of good. This restriction would fix the REAL problem that the govt services require Microsoft tools that basically puts govt agencies in charge of illegally dictating that companies required to report electronically MUST use a Microsoft product.. how fair is that? Most importantly, shouldn't that hugely unfair advantage of middle managers to require Microsoft products be removed for a few years?
not to mention all the friends, business associates and such that will cast their large block of votes along with him because he says so.. figure that for another 2-3% of tag-along votes. That's a powerful voice with enough clout to probably rank a board seat even if Microsoft did take over.
If you've been investing in Yahoo the last 10 years then what you described is a good reason to fight off the Microsoft takeover. Microsoft wants to kill the company before it has a chance to actually compete or even best them in another 5 years. My opinion would be that they want to fight it out to get the top spot ahead of Microsoft's presence on the internet for just the reasons you describe. That could be worth a lot more money than cashing out now.
A Yahoo -Google merger could be cool. Google has great geek stuff, but their forward facing stuff is very dull and boring, YouTube is the only "hot" property, the rest is mostly geek toys branching off the search base.
Yahoo has a great front end presence. Their page is fun for NORMAL people to go to. Lots of games, Flicker, groups are out front, things to do, etc. In a lot of ways they're ahead of Google but don't know what to DO with it because they have so much going on.
but Yahoo's value is in all that stuff. In some ways they are ahead of Google in that they have more people signed up and USING their services. Every Microsoft service I've tried that's been acquired has been dropped for lack of interest. When Microsoft started dropping accounts after a few weeks of inactivity I stopped trying. Please don't do that to Yahoo.
Yahoo has problems integrating what they've assembled into something slick where Google does a very good job at making services work well together. Frankly Yahoo's value is only there if they can play against Microsoft. If Microsoft gobbles them up they have no value other than a name. As a company their purpose is to win against the other boards, and for their customers... not to cash out to the enemy.. that's lame.
the deal with the EU basically allowed M$ to claim software patents over independently reverse-engineered common protocols like SAMBA right out from under the very people the specs are supposed to be HELPING! The whole thing reaks. This was the same 14k pages of trash the EU rejected earlier because it wasn't specific enough and included too much "IP" instead of just the manual to the software companies already invested in for 20 years.
exactly, but most slashdotters will hate it when it happens to them. The real trouble with such a situation now is that everybody wants to bitch about bandwidth but nobody wants to start informing users what they actually use. My opinion is that telcos want this to "break" so they can implement "pay per page" internet as the only way to fix the problems without actually spending money to build out. Note how Verison didn't implement fios in ernest until they got the "common carrier" traits rescinded for "data" services so they could change the terms. At this point we're just being told what they want us to hear until we stop squealing and give in.
then you have to increase the base rate for everybody by a little bit, which is always unpopular as people want people that use "more than them" to pay to fix it. In the case of towns, they borrow money and charge taxes for needed things. Of course the feds did give away hundreds of millions in tax breaks that weren't properly invested!
Think of your cell phone service, you pay for the company to maintain antennas to talk to YOUR phone. Your friends 2 states away pay for their company to maintain antennas in their towns. The cost is in maintaining the equipment for a given level of usage, not the per call cost. The particulars of how your call gets from your phone to your friends phone at a different phone company really aren't important and the companies should work that out.
That's how the internet was started from the beginning. The current high-bandwidth places like Google pay so much for bandwidth they by stock in Fiber. They are paying, considerably more than customers for all the packet they send out to their provider. And consumers are "legally" paying for the packet they accept...Which if you think about phone service or any other situation like mail is totally silly that IPS want to charge for "incoming call" packets.
The real problem is that ISPs traditionally discouraged being part of the real internet and were established as pure consumer leachers. They grew up their structures based on how fast they could "broadcast" web pages while severely limiting any kind of hosting between hosts or to the general internet. In a peer-sharing network, they have nothing to actually share. The structure forced means that all of the traffic for all of AT&T's customers in a given state go thru just a few actual internet connections, and no routes go thru. It's like car traffic thru all the "closed" subdivisions that all dump into one main road instead of providing alternate routes thru the countryside for the increased traffic.
I agree that P2P and caching would be good, but the telcos want big bucks for that... they are still thinking client-server. They want Viewers, not Customers... trying to monetize those under-priced DSL customers by selling expensive services found elsewhere on the internet.
You do realize that 100's of companies can claim the initials "MSI" correct in different markets, but there is only one "msi.com" and somebody else got there first. People have to change up their name to get an easy to remember domain. Other wise we could require the actual corporate "name", something a foot long spelling out all the words, that's what actually trademarked as the legal name of many companies.
but they will soon have Atom so they can undercut the low end AMD stuff where OEMS put bad hardware with poor performance anyway. It's a "new" market so Intel won't be accused of price dumping when they undercut everybody. Atom is Intel's reaction to OLPC that AMD tried to help out, but Intel waited for a finished product then swoops in with something cheap whipped up in a minute so AMD and the R&D people won't profit from it. Witness eeePC which is pretty much the Intel party line as far as OLPC replacement. Note Microsoft is in there as well. They've extended their low end XP so Linux based devices won't take off. The only thing left for AMD to do is to create a platform that can operate without Microsoft help. Something good at games, storage, wireless, and modular to scale well by hackers. Something highly friendly to Linux/Open Source. Go after robotics, home NAS, Gumstix, BugLabs type stuff that Intel is abandoning right now for their integrated everything, no modding stuff.
The militia is of the STATES, so National Guard does not apply. In fact National Guard would generally be illegal as Quartering troops because the State Governors do not have control over their troops. The Army does not have legal right to operate in the States unless specifically asked by the state.
They knew exactly what they were writing. The frontier was subject to constant "terrorist" attacks from indians and french at the time. The British had specifically forbidden the smaller villages from maintaining arms caches to defend against attacks in the middle of the night. Instead they demanded British troops be stationed in people's homes ruled only by the crown and not by Colony or local rules. It was the right of you and your neighbors to defend yourselves without "asking permission" from any government and without reprisal for doing so. Note that Britain as basiclly out lawed self defense even in your own home today. Even if your daughter is being raped, in your home, you can be brought to charges for having any kind of weapon used to defend her if the attackers die.
it regulates ARMS, not fire arms... that includes billy clubs, nun-chucks, swords, daggers, bowstaffs, BODY ARMOR etc. 90% of concealed weapons laws violate the right to bear a weapon... but it's not a gun so nobody cares.
Like the post said, so are voice phone calls, but we expect phone companies not to bug our phones. Hell, you could go to those little green boxes with a generic uniform on and listen all day and nobody would bother you. Of course they're be hell to pay if you were caught. Why is "internet" communications any different than normal ones, why should telcos be "listening in" to our conversations?
but IT in most companies is responsible for ALL the licensing and legal issues and that the key data the BOSS wants gets where the BOSS wants it... users are a distant second. Just like HR is responsible for hiring and payroll is responsible for paying, IT is responsible to do the job right and sometimes has to be very pushy to keep the company out of trouble, which is their job they are paid to be experts in.
Slashdot Mirror
the point is that the PAYING customers are still stuck with the same-old closed source product. The "open" version will always have little version differences from the supported version, so troubleshooting YOUR problems as a paying customer still isn't any easier.. for a matter of fact if you were using OpenSolaris developed software (free from the community) on Solaris, you could end up with MORE problems because the free people can't support you. It makes the free version nothing but a parlor trick.
but it's backwards of the Red Hat way. With Fedora, Red Hat lets the community run the roost and run whatever crazy things are cool on the tubes. They reserve RHEL for the cleaned up professional version that has what paying customers NEED and they support it. The community gets the warty version with all the lumps in return for it being free.
Sun wants to treat MySQL like a product. They want to give away the "free" version as a stripped down marketing tool. They want to put new code in Enterprise first, where fewer people will see it. The current model is that Enterprise is MORE stable and less agressive. The value of the GPL version is that lots of people put up with warts because it's free... paying customers won't do that by a long shot. The first time a nasty data killing bug shows up for the top paying customers they'll all jump ship for Sun not testing better.
How are farmers that reuse their seeds each year being compensated for their crops being "polluted" and unsellable by other farmers using "proprietary" seeds? How can farmers that want to practice "old fashioned" farming continue when their livelihood is changed by crops from other farmer's fields thru the normal course of nature and then the lawman comes and says they can't sell them? If farmers want to use GM seeds there needs to be guarantees those genetics stay in their licensed fields. Farmers make their money off the whims of nature, these seeds are no different. Otherwise they should sue for vermin and plague of locust that cross property lines too!
that is EXACTLY what the OOXML vs ODF was really about. If microsoft ever implemented a proper ODF filter or an OOXML that really worked, many departments in government would be legally compelled to purchase some Linux boxes just to try them out as "stand-by" options for due diligence in purchasing. If that ever happened Billy G. would start throwing chairs!
opposed to Microsoft who's already back on the horse making promises about the NEXT version of Windows and how great it will be when we don't have XP SP3 and Vista SP1 had to be recalled. We look forward to having what Vista promised in 2010... maybe.
I predict a powerPC based .Net only B-Box, and Xbox for businesses real soon. It will run only .Net 3.0 programs and only from a locked down terminal server. Companies will Love it. The only thing stopping that is Microsoft's complete inability to update their products to their plans in a timely manner.
but that's how they WANT it to be. Years ago they realized hardware was getting TOO standardized. It's better for Microsoft if they let other people write the drivers just a little different. That keeps the hardware from becoming too much the same and upstart OSes from instantly taking over. I believe there were some articles on /. about that very issue.
Russia has more than enough experience to run a station.... WTF. More parts of ISS are built by them and they log way more manned hours than the US team does. They're much better at extreme repairs under dire conditions than US astronauts also.
Their process is a bit backwards, they have cheap, stable, easy to build large rockets. The only problem is that they are no where near as efficient as US rockets... they can lift Heavy... cheap... exactly what space building requires. Besides if they need robotics or other complex stuff NASA has been laying off for years.. they can borrow somebody cheap.
I agree with that. It's not that some other company will beat Microsoft out, just that people will stop caring. That's what happened to IBM with the PC. The market advanced and nobody cared about IBM doing everything different so they could charge you more. Vista is exactly the same case.
It doesn't help that Microsoft with Xbox and Zune have shot their own multimedia partners in the back. New devices are all about iPod or Linux. Very little tries to play with Windows media anymore as it's irrelevant to the marketplace. Microsoft sabotaged PC gaming to build up Xbox, now normal people don't buy PC games.. they don't need Windows for anything except MS Office in most cases.
In my house I have a dozen devices and only 2 or 3 are Windows. Routers, Network hard drives, Wii, Apple TV, Network printers... all operate outside Windows and happily together. Even consumers are getting tired of DVD burners, photo printers and such tied to buggy windows computers and device makers are making more stand-alone devices that use common or open (i.e. non MS) formats to store data on the network or memory stix. Consider Tivo, Slingbox, & eeePC are all non-microsoft it's already irrelevant to the normal person except as a business tool. I keep one Windows Box for my Wife to do business stuff on, but even for school, I do everything on a Mac or linux box without any Microsoft software. The only thing Windows has is inertia.
In some industries you'd be hard pressed to cut out IBM simply because they have so much built up, If they closed down tomorrow, it would hurt for a few months, but nobody would really care. Microsoft is headed down the same path and they are ill equipped to live in a world to compete on DELIVERY and SERVICE not marketing.
Steve has shown in 5 years that Apple can release more interesting stuff than Microsoft. Apple just "does" it, they don't pre-announce years in advance. Steve just shows up on sage with a fully operational Intel Mac running Apple's software Suite (OSX, iLife, etc) on day 1, or with a fully functioning iPhone that happens to have used OSX, on day 1.
Microsoft bellyaches how "hard" software is to make, and constantly delays (and they don't make computers or phones and sell them) Apple makes it look very easy and investors are starting to see Microsoft isn't really that good at their CORE job.
wrong, even in the US contract don't go 100% to the lowest bidder. There are all sorts of rules about limiting "single source" options. If that wasn't the case IBM would still be a monopoly because they'd under cut the federal contracts to keep the channel locked up. Microsoft is one of the few non-defense companies that can get away with no-bid contracts 100% of the time.
Microsoft clearly broke EU law, just like any other lawbreaker, they will have trouble finding government-sponsored work. This will also help to prop up some other companies to compete with them. Even a small portion of just EU govt sales is larger than all of a company like Mandriva's budget for a few years... the money would be gladly welcome and do everybody a lot of good. This restriction would fix the REAL problem that the govt services require Microsoft tools that basically puts govt agencies in charge of illegally dictating that companies required to report electronically MUST use a Microsoft product.. how fair is that? Most importantly, shouldn't that hugely unfair advantage of middle managers to require Microsoft products be removed for a few years?
not to mention all the friends, business associates and such that will cast their large block of votes along with him because he says so .. figure that for another 2-3% of tag-along votes. That's a powerful voice with enough clout to probably rank a board seat even if Microsoft did take over.
If you've been investing in Yahoo the last 10 years then what you described is a good reason to fight off the Microsoft takeover. Microsoft wants to kill the company before it has a chance to actually compete or even best them in another 5 years. My opinion would be that they want to fight it out to get the top spot ahead of Microsoft's presence on the internet for just the reasons you describe. That could be worth a lot more money than cashing out now.
A Yahoo -Google merger could be cool. Google has great geek stuff, but their forward facing stuff is very dull and boring, YouTube is the only "hot" property, the rest is mostly geek toys branching off the search base.
Yahoo has a great front end presence. Their page is fun for NORMAL people to go to. Lots of games, Flicker, groups are out front, things to do, etc. In a lot of ways they're ahead of Google but don't know what to DO with it because they have so much going on.
but Yahoo's value is in all that stuff. In some ways they are ahead of Google in that they have more people signed up and USING their services. Every Microsoft service I've tried that's been acquired has been dropped for lack of interest. When Microsoft started dropping accounts after a few weeks of inactivity I stopped trying. Please don't do that to Yahoo.
Yahoo has problems integrating what they've assembled into something slick where Google does a very good job at making services work well together. Frankly Yahoo's value is only there if they can play against Microsoft. If Microsoft gobbles them up they have no value other than a name. As a company their purpose is to win against the other boards, and for their customers... not to cash out to the enemy.. that's lame.
the deal with the EU basically allowed M$ to claim software patents over independently reverse-engineered common protocols like SAMBA right out from under the very people the specs are supposed to be HELPING! The whole thing reaks. This was the same 14k pages of trash the EU rejected earlier because it wasn't specific enough and included too much "IP" instead of just the manual to the software companies already invested in for 20 years.
exactly, but most slashdotters will hate it when it happens to them. The real trouble with such a situation now is that everybody wants to bitch about bandwidth but nobody wants to start informing users what they actually use. My opinion is that telcos want this to "break" so they can implement "pay per page" internet as the only way to fix the problems without actually spending money to build out. Note how Verison didn't implement fios in ernest until they got the "common carrier" traits rescinded for "data" services so they could change the terms. At this point we're just being told what they want us to hear until we stop squealing and give in.
then you have to increase the base rate for everybody by a little bit, which is always unpopular as people want people that use "more than them" to pay to fix it. In the case of towns, they borrow money and charge taxes for needed things. Of course the feds did give away hundreds of millions in tax breaks that weren't properly invested!
Why, when we already have something better?
Think of your cell phone service, you pay for the company to maintain antennas to talk to YOUR phone. Your friends 2 states away pay for their company to maintain antennas in their towns. The cost is in maintaining the equipment for a given level of usage, not the per call cost. The particulars of how your call gets from your phone to your friends phone at a different phone company really aren't important and the companies should work that out.
That's how the internet was started from the beginning. The current high-bandwidth places like Google pay so much for bandwidth they by stock in Fiber. They are paying, considerably more than customers for all the packet they send out to their provider. And consumers are "legally" paying for the packet they accept...Which if you think about phone service or any other situation like mail is totally silly that IPS want to charge for "incoming call" packets.
The real problem is that ISPs traditionally discouraged being part of the real internet and were established as pure consumer leachers. They grew up their structures based on how fast they could "broadcast" web pages while severely limiting any kind of hosting between hosts or to the general internet. In a peer-sharing network, they have nothing to actually share. The structure forced means that all of the traffic for all of AT&T's customers in a given state go thru just a few actual internet connections, and no routes go thru. It's like car traffic thru all the "closed" subdivisions that all dump into one main road instead of providing alternate routes thru the countryside for the increased traffic.
I agree that P2P and caching would be good, but the telcos want big bucks for that... they are still thinking client-server. They want Viewers, not Customers... trying to monetize those under-priced DSL customers by selling expensive services found elsewhere on the internet.
You do realize that 100's of companies can claim the initials "MSI" correct in different markets, but there is only one "msi.com" and somebody else got there first. People have to change up their name to get an easy to remember domain. Other wise we could require the actual corporate "name", something a foot long spelling out all the words, that's what actually trademarked as the legal name of many companies.
but they will soon have Atom so they can undercut the low end AMD stuff where OEMS put bad hardware with poor performance anyway. It's a "new" market so Intel won't be accused of price dumping when they undercut everybody. Atom is Intel's reaction to OLPC that AMD tried to help out, but Intel waited for a finished product then swoops in with something cheap whipped up in a minute so AMD and the R&D people won't profit from it. Witness eeePC which is pretty much the Intel party line as far as OLPC replacement.
Note Microsoft is in there as well. They've extended their low end XP so Linux based devices won't take off. The only thing left for AMD to do is to create a platform that can operate without Microsoft help. Something good at games, storage, wireless, and modular to scale well by hackers. Something highly friendly to Linux/Open Source. Go after robotics, home NAS, Gumstix, BugLabs type stuff that Intel is abandoning right now for their integrated everything, no modding stuff.
The militia is of the STATES, so National Guard does not apply. In fact National Guard would generally be illegal as Quartering troops because the State Governors do not have control over their troops. The Army does not have legal right to operate in the States unless specifically asked by the state.
They knew exactly what they were writing. The frontier was subject to constant "terrorist" attacks from indians and french at the time. The British had specifically forbidden the smaller villages from maintaining arms caches to defend against attacks in the middle of the night. Instead they demanded British troops be stationed in people's homes ruled only by the crown and not by Colony or local rules. It was the right of you and your neighbors to defend yourselves without "asking permission" from any government and without reprisal for doing so. Note that Britain as basiclly out lawed self defense even in your own home today. Even if your daughter is being raped, in your home, you can be brought to charges for having any kind of weapon used to defend her if the attackers die.
it regulates ARMS, not fire arms... that includes billy clubs, nun-chucks, swords, daggers, bowstaffs, BODY ARMOR etc. 90% of concealed weapons laws violate the right to bear a weapon... but it's not a gun so nobody cares.
Like the post said, so are voice phone calls, but we expect phone companies not to bug our phones. Hell, you could go to those little green boxes with a generic uniform on and listen all day and nobody would bother you. Of course they're be hell to pay if you were caught. Why is "internet" communications any different than normal ones, why should telcos be "listening in" to our conversations?
but IT in most companies is responsible for ALL the licensing and legal issues and that the key data the BOSS wants gets where the BOSS wants it... users are a distant second. Just like HR is responsible for hiring and payroll is responsible for paying, IT is responsible to do the job right and sometimes has to be very pushy to keep the company out of trouble, which is their job they are paid to be experts in.