Mandrake was an easy point and click to install for me: certainly no more difficult than Windows.
Also bear in mind that typically installing a Linux distro also means installing most of the appications you need: it should not be compared to installing Windows but to isntalling Windows and MS Office and Acrobat Distiller and Photoshop and CD ripping software and a few other major apps in one go. Now which looks like the easier and quicker process?
Word Standard Edition can save into WordML (which schema has been published). Enterprise version allows you to map certain parts of documents into Xml with customer specified schema.
Whats the default?.doc? Then that is what almost everyone will be using.
Be letting people priate they destroy the cost advantage of free software and gain market and mindshare. When an economy develops to the point where more people can afford $500 everyone will be already be locked in and then MS (and others) wills tart enforcing their copyrights.
The reason is simple. They do not have to figure out how to make money from the internet. On top of this they have huge amounts of good content available from their broadcast channels.
The British TV license (a lot less than a satellite of cable TV sub btw) pays for all this.
Simple, ivil liability for negligence if you did not take reasonable measures in the circumstances to ensure your PC was secure.
Fore example, if you are running a server you have applied patches for known vulnerabilities, if you are a client permenantly connected to the internet you avhe installed a firewall etc.
Of course I do not think people should be punished for every mistake, but if you ahve been genuinely negligent and someone has suffered a loss as a result you should have to compensate them.
I wonder what is possible within the confines of the law as it is?
No, a monopolist is anyone who, when they raise the prices of their product, will only see a decline in unit sales that follows the market demand curve rather than drop off sharply.
Of course MS do not have a perfect monopoly, they are close enough. Free market economies are built on competition that is as free as possible, but very few products (only pure comodities and securities) can actually trade in perfectly competitive markets.
Are you saying it would be a good thing if Standard Oil still controlled the US oil market? Or if Glaxo-Pfizer and a few others could merge to form a drugs monoploy (they would if they could).Intel could buy AMD (and probably ARM, MIPS, and a few others) and then merge with IBM's processor division - can you imagine anyone getting into that market from scratch?
If you have a market with no barriers to entry there is no problem, if prices rise then new entrants will come in. In a lot of markets this is difficult, and in any case a small new entrant could be bought out by an incumbent monopoly.
Without competition laws there would be no free market.
Bureaucracy they may be, but I am not sure they will do any worse than ICANN....
The article talks about something like the International Telecommunications Union, which has worked fairly well - international cotnrol could be good, if it is done right.
I used to get 10 or 15 a day to one particular address: it had been on my web site for about 5 or 6 years and was the catch all address for a tree letter.com domain.
I stopped using it, and stopped using a catch all, so now I get hardly any spam.
How do people end up getting huge numbers of spam? What is different? Is it just common names and guessing? No becuase Then I should still have got a fair amount to the domain as a whole.
What worries me is that the side effect of most anti spam measurers in the long run will be to make the internet more corporate run (e.g. stopping people running their own mail servers, making life harder for small ISPs when they find it hard to get off blacklists etc.)
Firstly you whould make it clear that it is a one off.
You should also consider if you want to make it regular now that you are in profit. I would suggest a profit related formula which is what all my employers use - people do not get unrealistic expectations, and you do not have to pay out as much when times are hard. You also need to make the formula robust (what fill it be workable if you take on another five people?)
The amount is not a lot, but that depends on where you are. It would not be a particularly big bonus for professional people where I have worked (investment management/investment banking the Britain, same sectors and software in Sri Lanka). However those are examples where people expect a high proportion of their income to be from bonuses, you need to establish what industry norms are where you are.
Doing better than industry norms makes people feel good.
The bonus will also make employees feel that you ahve confidence in the future of the business - important for a start up - you are unlikely to pay out if you are not confident you will need the money.
Thats why this will kill non MS OSes and Office suites.
Once a few big corporations start sending all their email out this way, and circulating only DRMed office docs, then everyone else will have to use MS office to do business with them
Example: All the investment banks send institutional clients emailed research, with a notice on it saying it is not to be circulated further. Now they will be able to enforce it, and they will.
Every busienss will have at least one big customer who will insist on this.
All this assumes the DMCA will stop reverse engineering.
1) The author of the article assumes that people who are platform agnostic are necessarilly balanced. this implicitly assumes that one platform can not in fact actually be better than the other.
2) How exactly does he think that Linux Zealots will affect the SCO case? It depends on matters of fact, and the contracts between SCO and IBM (and others).
3) He also acknowledges that unix and open source has advantages. He claims the "Pros" favour BSDs as they are less "distracting".
Coffee? I managed to spill a glass of wine on my keyboard. It seemed OK so I saw no reason to change my habbit of keeing in drink next to my keyboard in the evening. Not even when a second glass of wine got spilt on the keyboard (actually my wife might have been responsible for that one).
The third glass of wine did not damage any hardware but Windows BSODed and my hard drive was corrupted badly enough to stop me rebooting. I had to reinstall Windows (for the coincidentally for the last time).
They have a staff of
nine, only one of whom (the managing director, transactions) has any real experience relevant to assessing a company like this.
The portfolio manager (the key person) seems to have a background as some sort of quantitative analyst: which means he is probably very bright andat mathematical modelling, but does not understand anything about a business other than numbers (especailly stats).
I spent most of the last few eyars working as an analyst (investment not ssytems!) so I know how to judge these guys. Incidentally the posters suggesting that Baystar are planning to short SCO have not done their maths.
... that does not make antispammers automatically right.
I do not like spam anymore than anyone else: it is a nuisance:
However it is not the spammers that lead to my outgoing email not being delivered. It took me a full day to realise because a lot was not being bounced back, simply disappearing leaving me under the impression it had been delivered.
When Yahoo bounced back an email with an explanation as to why, then I discovered that my ISP had been blacklisted for having an open relay.
The cure was worse than the disease. Email is vital to a lot of us and stopping spam in a way that also cuts of tens of thousands of innocent people each time is too drastic: OK, I just switched to web mail, but the average user would not know what to do (e.g. my father assumed his Yahoo web mail would have been blocked as well becaue it ultiamtely went through the same ISP: not everyone understands that http is not smtp).
Blacklists also favour larger ISPs . Small ISPs are causally blacklsited, on the other hand very few people would dare block a major ISP (say AOL) whatever they did.
Andy Grove just demonstrates again something that has been known from the time of Adam Smith: businesses favour free trade, except for their own industry which needs protection for some reason.
As other poseters have pointed out protectionism never works in the long term anyway.
A nuiscance. What proportion of Windows users do you think actually do this?
run a decent virus-scan at regular intervals
also a nuisance
and don't idiotically open up every random email attachment you get, you'll be fine.
Some viruses only need to have Outlook's preview pane open. I like a preview pane and would not be happy about keeping it closed.
Furthermore the problem now is that I get emails from virus infected friend's address's with plausible subjects. If it was just a matter of not opening unscanned attachments (as it used to be) it was nto too much of a problem, as things are now it is (for me anyway).
I was sending out my resumes as a TXT email or printed from Wordperfect for Linux.
Why? Plain text is not going to make you look good and people may not be able to read WP. I always send documents like that as PDFs. I sent out dozens of CVs (resumes) last and only one person had trouble reading it (and most people replied so they had read it).
IE from Mozilla (not a problem, Mozilla is slow, clunky, and doesn't support anything as easily as IE on Windows)
This one is a matter of teast, I use both daily and prefer Moz to IE. I prefer Opera or Galeon to either.
Office was MUCH better than WP for Linux.
Ever had an interoperability problem with OPen Office? I never have: not for.docs, powerpoint presentations or spreadsheets.
I didn't have to worry about dependencies breaking, problems with "stable", "unstable", or "seriously broken and use at your own risk".
But you do need to worry about viruses, the main reason I switched to Windows. If you use IE and Outlook you should be really worried.
It sounds as though you are comparing obsolete Linux software (WP for Linux is no longer supported AFAIK) with the latest Windows software, and I suspect you are running Linux on older hardware. Try comparing like with like and you may feel different. Also do not just compare on Windows strengths but Linux's as well.
Re:"based on Linux" != Linux
on
NTT Joins OSDL
·
· Score: 1
Based on Linux will probably mean a Linux distro.
In any case as it will be open source (according to the aricle the parent comment links to) even if it is a fork of Linux code from it is likely to end up back in Linux, and it will either stay compatible with Linux proper, or Linux distros will be able to provide compatability.
I do not see that they will gain anything from forking so what we will see is a Linux distro with lots of work done on Asian languages, security, and whatever else suits their particular needs.
What happens if the kids decide to write lyrics to existing (in copyright) music? Or variants on existing lyrics?
As kids can get carried away with enthusiasam I can easilly imagine some then distributing it.
One thing I am sure of is that this is going to go wrong (for the RIAA) in unpredictable ways, at best it will be ineffective. This is a sign of desperation.
Arsdigita (when it was run by Phil Greenspun) made much faster progress on my former employers website then the previous developers. They had the key functionality up (albeit internally and untested) within weeks wheras the previous developers (Icon Medialab) had got almost nothing working after about six months.
So that explains why software developed so slowly, and there were no niche vertical applications before software patents (which are fairly recent)?
Oh....
Slashdot Mirror
Yes.
Mandrake was an easy point and click to install for me: certainly no more difficult than Windows.
Also bear in mind that typically installing a Linux distro also means installing most of the appications you need: it should not be compared to installing Windows but to isntalling Windows and MS Office and Acrobat Distiller and Photoshop and CD ripping software and a few other major apps in one go. Now which looks like the easier and quicker process?
Whats the default? .doc? Then that is what almost everyone will be using.
same functionality and a nice simple to use GUI.
I think it can import word.
Be letting people priate they destroy the cost advantage of free software and gain market and mindshare. When an economy develops to the point where more people can afford $500 everyone will be already be locked in and then MS (and others) wills tart enforcing their copyrights.
The reason is simple. They do not have to figure out how to make money from the internet. On top of this they have huge amounts of good content available from their broadcast channels.
The British TV license (a lot less than a satellite of cable TV sub btw) pays for all this.
Simple, ivil liability for negligence if you did not take reasonable measures in the circumstances to ensure your PC was secure.
Fore example, if you are running a server you have applied patches for known vulnerabilities, if you are a client permenantly connected to the internet you avhe installed a firewall etc.
Of course I do not think people should be punished for every mistake, but if you ahve been genuinely negligent and someone has suffered a loss as a result you should have to compensate them.
I wonder what is possible within the confines of the law as it is?
No, a monopolist is anyone who, when they raise the prices of their product, will only see a decline in unit sales that follows the market demand curve rather than drop off sharply.
Of course MS do not have a perfect monopoly, they are close enough. Free market economies are built on competition that is as free as possible, but very few products (only pure comodities and securities) can actually trade in perfectly competitive markets.
Are you saying it would be a good thing if Standard Oil still controlled the US oil market? Or if Glaxo-Pfizer and a few others could merge to form a drugs monoploy (they would if they could).Intel could buy AMD (and probably ARM, MIPS, and a few others) and then merge with IBM's processor division - can you imagine anyone getting into that market from scratch?
If you have a market with no barriers to entry there is no problem, if prices rise then new entrants will come in. In a lot of markets this is difficult, and in any case a small new entrant could be bought out by an incumbent monopoly.
Without competition laws there would be no free market.
Bureaucracy they may be, but I am not sure they will do any worse than ICANN....
The article talks about something like the International Telecommunications Union, which has worked fairly well - international cotnrol could be good, if it is done right.
Me to.
.com domain.
I used to get 10 or 15 a day to one particular address: it had been on my web site for about 5 or 6 years and was the catch all address for a tree letter
I stopped using it, and stopped using a catch all, so now I get hardly any spam.
How do people end up getting huge numbers of spam? What is different? Is it just common names and guessing? No becuase Then I should still have got a fair amount to the domain as a whole.
What worries me is that the side effect of most anti spam measurers in the long run will be to make the internet more corporate run (e.g. stopping people running their own mail servers, making life harder for small ISPs when they find it hard to get off blacklists etc.)
Firstly you whould make it clear that it is a one off.
You should also consider if you want to make it regular now that you are in profit. I would suggest a profit related formula which is what all my employers use - people do not get unrealistic expectations, and you do not have to pay out as much when times are hard. You also need to make the formula robust (what fill it be workable if you take on another five people?)
The amount is not a lot, but that depends on where you are. It would not be a particularly big bonus for professional people where I have worked (investment management/investment banking the Britain, same sectors and software in Sri Lanka). However those are examples where people expect a high proportion of their income to be from bonuses, you need to establish what industry norms are where you are.
Doing better than industry norms makes people feel good.
The bonus will also make employees feel that you ahve confidence in the future of the business - important for a start up - you are unlikely to pay out if you are not confident you will need the money.
You've been trolled.
Exactly the same post has appeared several time in the last few weeks.
Once EULAs start affecting products they can understand, legislators will understand why they are a bad idea.
Once a few big corporations start sending all their email out this way, and circulating only DRMed office docs, then everyone else will have to use MS office to do business with them
Example: All the investment banks send institutional clients emailed research, with a notice on it saying it is not to be circulated further. Now they will be able to enforce it, and they will.
Every busienss will have at least one big customer who will insist on this.
All this assumes the DMCA will stop reverse engineering.
2) How exactly does he think that Linux Zealots will affect the SCO case? It depends on matters of fact, and the contracts between SCO and IBM (and others).
3) He also acknowledges that unix and open source has advantages. He claims the "Pros" favour BSDs as they are less "distracting".
He is also a comitted MS apologist who has previously written a piece claiming that MS's dissatissfied custmomers have only themselves to blame for,among other things, not buyng Premier Support
Coffee? I managed to spill a glass of wine on my keyboard. It seemed OK so I saw no reason to change my habbit of keeing in drink next to my keyboard in the evening. Not even when a second glass of wine got spilt on the keyboard (actually my wife might have been responsible for that one).
The third glass of wine did not damage any hardware but Windows BSODed and my hard drive was corrupted badly enough to stop me rebooting. I had to reinstall Windows (for the coincidentally for the last time).
This one is. Read up on their CTO .
They have a staff of nine, only one of whom (the managing director, transactions) has any real experience relevant to assessing a company like this.
The portfolio manager (the key person) seems to have a background as some sort of quantitative analyst: which means he is probably very bright andat mathematical modelling, but does not understand anything about a business other than numbers (especailly stats).
I spent most of the last few eyars working as an analyst (investment not ssytems!) so I know how to judge these guys. Incidentally the posters suggesting that Baystar are planning to short SCO have not done their maths.
... that does not make antispammers automatically right. I do not like spam anymore than anyone else: it is a nuisance: However it is not the spammers that lead to my outgoing email not being delivered. It took me a full day to realise because a lot was not being bounced back, simply disappearing leaving me under the impression it had been delivered. When Yahoo bounced back an email with an explanation as to why, then I discovered that my ISP had been blacklisted for having an open relay. The cure was worse than the disease. Email is vital to a lot of us and stopping spam in a way that also cuts of tens of thousands of innocent people each time is too drastic: OK, I just switched to web mail, but the average user would not know what to do (e.g. my father assumed his Yahoo web mail would have been blocked as well becaue it ultiamtely went through the same ISP: not everyone understands that http is not smtp). Blacklists also favour larger ISPs . Small ISPs are causally blacklsited, on the other hand very few people would dare block a major ISP (say AOL) whatever they did.
As other poseters have pointed out protectionism never works in the long term anyway.
A nuiscance. What proportion of Windows users do you think actually do this?
run a decent virus-scan at regular intervals
also a nuisance
and don't idiotically open up every random email attachment you get, you'll be fine.
Some viruses only need to have Outlook's preview pane open. I like a preview pane and would not be happy about keeping it closed.
Furthermore the problem now is that I get emails from virus infected friend's address's with plausible subjects. If it was just a matter of not opening unscanned attachments (as it used to be) it was nto too much of a problem, as things are now it is (for me anyway).
Why? Plain text is not going to make you look good and people may not be able to read WP. I always send documents like that as PDFs. I sent out dozens of CVs (resumes) last and only one person had trouble reading it (and most people replied so they had read it).
IE from Mozilla (not a problem, Mozilla is slow, clunky, and doesn't support anything as easily as IE on Windows)
This one is a matter of teast, I use both daily and prefer Moz to IE. I prefer Opera or Galeon to either.
Office was MUCH better than WP for Linux.
Ever had an interoperability problem with OPen Office? I never have: not for .docs, powerpoint presentations or spreadsheets.
I didn't have to worry about dependencies breaking, problems with "stable", "unstable", or "seriously broken and use at your own risk".
But you do need to worry about viruses, the main reason I switched to Windows. If you use IE and Outlook you should be really worried.
It sounds as though you are comparing obsolete Linux software (WP for Linux is no longer supported AFAIK) with the latest Windows software, and I suspect you are running Linux on older hardware. Try comparing like with like and you may feel different. Also do not just compare on Windows strengths but Linux's as well.
In any case as it will be open source (according to the aricle the parent comment links to) even if it is a fork of Linux code from it is likely to end up back in Linux, and it will either stay compatible with Linux proper, or Linux distros will be able to provide compatability.
I do not see that they will gain anything from forking so what we will see is a Linux distro with lots of work done on Asian languages, security, and whatever else suits their particular needs.
What happens if the kids decide to write lyrics to existing (in copyright) music? Or variants on existing lyrics? As kids can get carried away with enthusiasam I can easilly imagine some then distributing it. One thing I am sure of is that this is going to go wrong (for the RIAA) in unpredictable ways, at best it will be ineffective. This is a sign of desperation.
While it seems really groovy to have all kinds of cool things they were all just ways to keep us there rather than being at home with our families
I agree. There is a price to pay for nice offices.
On top of this I can see very little special about this office: Mine is a LOT better and so are plenty of others.
It all looks like a subtle Fog Creek ad: I hope they paid for it.
Arsdigita (when it was run by Phil Greenspun) made much faster progress on my former employers website then the previous developers. They had the key functionality up (albeit internally and untested) within weeks wheras the previous developers (Icon Medialab) had got almost nothing working after about six months.
So that explains why software developed so slowly, and there were no niche vertical applications before software patents (which are fairly recent)? Oh....