Hey, if we can all switch over to Paris Meridian Time before the Millenium then we could watch all the MS boxes out there crash 9 minutes and 22 seconds earlier!
Stop working on those Y2K bugs, we must devote ALL of our attention on the new problem of removing Greenwich mean time to Paris mean time!
Why is the start menu a bad concept you ask? Well, I don't have a problem with the original concept, but I find the excessive layering that occurs can be quite annoying. Going from Start to programs to Generic Software Company folder to Generic Software Utils to Acme Software Graphic... gets really old. Eventually you put all the stuff that you use on the desktop anyway. The excessive layering in the Start menu can be just as annoying as having a message that is a far out on a thread as this on. You only want to look so far for something before getting ticked. If there was a limit to how far down a layer in a menu could go then it would be great.
Personally I like how Enlightenment allows for three different menus depending on which button you click. It keeps things relatively close.
Have you ever dealt with a NT system with a relatively new Service Pack installed on it? It isn't a pretty sight at times. Service Pack 4 was very unstable for quite some time, and actually broke NT in the early versions. I know people that have refused to put on a service pack until it is one rev. back because of really bad experiences they have had with Service Packs 1-4. MS knew better than to put SP5 on the system, realizing that it would probably cause it to be less stable. If SP5 had been up for the challenge MS would have used it. If you are using SP5, I suggest you do as MS did, and not use it for now.
1) I really don't see how this strategy is any different than any other FUD strategy composed by MS. They are admitting that Apache is better than IIE, and that they have something that is going to be better coming out really soon. They are just trying to keep their IIE people loyal for another X years, until Win 2000 comes out. I think they are seeing a trend of people running away from IIE and towards Apache and they are just trying to keep that from happening with this "Windows 2000 will solve this problem" line.
2) Knowing MS, the number of bugs, err, special features, that they have in the first release of a new MS product will probably be overwhelming. Especially if they try to create something that is small, effeciant, and fast. Those three adjectives don't fit MS in any way. It will be a while before anything of any substance comes out.
3) We are all working on speculation. MS is playing with peoples minds, and we, including me, are letting ourselves get caught up in it. Our first priority should be to fix the problems that we had during the Mindcraft experiment, and then keep rolling on. We are already picking up steam, gaining a lot of support, and a lot of press coverage. The easiest way for MS to destroy OSS is to change our focus. If we spend our time guessing at what MS is going to do next and then trying to counter-act it we will have lost the original goal of OSS, and may not accomplish what needs to be done.
Sticks and stones may break our bones but FUD can never hurt us.
It is good to hear that #9 has finally decided to help out and get their Revolution IV fully functional with Linux. I was going to get one at one point but didn't see any support for it in Linux and so I tabled the idea. In fact I am about a week or two away from buying a new video card and it is nice to see even more freedom in my choice.
My guess is that they realized that it is the Linux users who build their own computer, who look for than just gaming power in a video card, which is what the Rev IV is, and are more likely to take the time to pull apart their machine to upgrade. It is a smart business move on their part to give support to Linux.
Chances are very good that S3 is going to be moving to join the bandwagon soon. With a couple big name companies like Matrox and #9 already supporting Linux, and if they have any market research they will join up soon. They are probably spending too much time working on the buyout/merger with Diamond right now to make another major move like support Linux. It is only a matter of time before they support Linux anyway, any graphics company that keeps up with their market research will realize that the Linux community spends a disproportionate amount of money upgrading their computers to the latest and greatest stuff compaired to the average Joe Shmo Windows user. To not cater to the power user is a fatal flaw for any computer periferal company like S3.
Here is an interesting question that really doesn't have much to do with the article but oh well. When, as in what is the average age of the person, does someone switch over to Linux from MS?
From what I can tell there are a lot of people in the Linux community that are in college. My guess is that there is probably a disproportionate amount of Linux users to MS users in the college scene. I know that at the college that I go to, a great deal of the engineering students have gotten really ticked at MS and NT and there seems to be a very large number that are switching over to Linux. One of the big reasons is that there are quite a few labs for upper division classes are run with SPARC stations, and with ethernet connections in the dorms students have found that it is easier to get Linux on their box. They just ssh over to the lab and work from their room. You can't get nearly seamless connection between two computers with NT, especially if the one that is the important one is running Solaris.
Very true, MS is very capable of improving their product in order to stay alive. A really good example of this is the MS vs Borland battles. I have been working with WordPerfect since the days that Borland coupled it with Quattro Pro. This combination caused MS to improve Word and Excel very rapidly in order to compete with Borland. Although I still think WordPerfect is a far superior word processor than Word, I do have to conceed that Excel is infact a better spreadsheet than Quattro Pro at this time, but I still use Quattro Pro.
Over the past couple of years there hasn't been much of a threat to MS and so they have really let their OS and several of their other products to become very very bloated and sloppy because they haven't needed to drastically improve them in order to mantain a strangle hold on the market. Linux has shown, is showing, and will continue to show itself to be a very imposing threat to MS. They aren't going to sit on their behinds and watch us pass them by without a battle.
NT will improve, quickly. To be ignorant of MS's ability to improve a product with the amount of resources that they have would be a mistake.
Shall we overcome? I am going to say yes, in time. Will future battle be easy? Definately not. MS is preparing for war and considering what has happened to Borland, err Inprise, and OS/2 that should not be taken lightly.
There is a good reason why HotJava 3 hasn't been updated in a long time, and it ISN'T because Sun is working on a new release. Trust me friend, that road is a dead end.
I think the idea of offering wider platform support would probably be well advised, especially for Sparc stations. I was kind of hoping to see how good it does with XML but I wasn't able to get it to work on my Ultra here at work. I do understand that it is Pre-ALPHA ware but with there being a Sun-Netscape aliance one would think that with this being the sucessor of Netscape 4.x there might be something for Solaris on SparcStations. Oh well, can't get everything you want in life now can ya. Well, not yet.
I could be wrong, so you probably want to do some more homework on this, but from what I have read about the K(6-3 &7) vs PIII chips is that if that are a lot of processes demanding very intense floating point calculations AMD will generally tend to lag. Creating the number of processes that it takes to do this is not easy to do. From what I hear it is nearly impossible to do it on a machine with only one user on it at a time. As for the K6-2, it is slower on floating point calculations in general. They are all really good processors, and if you aren't setting up a server with several dumb terms around all doing ray-tracing and very large and complex PERL apps, you should be fine.
I think that K7 can be trademarked, I'm not sure. I do know that just plain old numbers cannot. I have to agree with one of the earlier comments about naming the chip so that the mainstream can identify.
I have a hunch if AMD is really doing this, and as I mentioned before I have found no info on the AMD web site about renaming their chip, we should probably expect some large scale marketing from them on the release of the chip. They need to bring themselves out of the shadow of Intel, and the way they are going to do that is with advertising. I may not be a marketer, but I do know that catchy words like "Athlon" stick in the heads of the mass market which is what AMD needs to thrive.
Yes, Einstein did work very hard, and accomplished a great deal for physics. The TV's we have today, and mircoprocessors wouldn't be possible without Quantum theory. But we should never forget that although Einstein pioneered the quantum field, he also quickly disowned it due to religious beliefs. Not only that, but it took a Catholic priest/physicist to convince him that the universe was in fact expanding and to take that stupid constant out of his theory of general relativity. Although he was a genius, it took many more geniuses to fight him in order to prevent him from really messing up his theories.
As for this "5%" bunk. We use more than 90%, the discussion of 5% only deals with the idea of when we are doing a certain process, ie some hard math problem. Also, that is only for guys. It is a known fact that when men concentrate on a problem small sections of the brain are used very heavily, where women use a larger percentage of the brain but less intensly.
Another good one from MS is from Word 3.0 to Word 95. If you look at the headers there is a string that says Word 6. And one of the patches for Word 97 changed a string in the headers from Word 7 to Word 8. Funny how a patch can constitute a whole new release number in the header.:) or perhaps MS's release numbers in Word are for tracking when they released something to fix the "bug" of WordPerfect being able to convert the files over? Just a thought.
Correct me if I am wrong, but isn't the test server a multiprocessor x86 machine that costs >$10000? Frankly, I don't see why everyone is so worked up over a test like this. Any company that is setting up a server, whether it be a web server or whatever, and is willing to spend that much money is going to do some homework before they go out and buy something. Anyone in the computer industry knows that with that kind of money more powerful machines start to really enter into the field, like Alphas, Ultras, and SGI workstations. All of which, when loaded with Linux or their respective OS, will beat out a x86 machine loaded with MS any day of the week. As for companies that aren't as computer savy, Linux's older cousins like Sun, SGI, and SCO have extensive marketing teams who's job is to show the customer what is out there at that price. If MS wants to conduct feel good tests in order to improve moral in their company, fine, I could care less. As for porting Office 2000 onto Linux. I hope they don't port that piece over to Linux. Even if they do, who is going to spend money, year after year, on junk like that when Corel is giving out a better word processor for free?
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Hey, if we can all switch over to Paris Meridian Time before the Millenium then we could watch all the MS boxes out there crash 9 minutes and 22 seconds earlier!
Stop working on those Y2K bugs, we must devote ALL of our attention on the new problem of removing Greenwich mean time to Paris mean time!
Why is the start menu a bad concept you ask?
Well, I don't have a problem with the original concept, but I find the excessive layering that occurs can be quite annoying. Going from Start to programs to Generic Software Company folder to Generic Software Utils to Acme Software Graphic... gets really old. Eventually you put all the stuff that you use on the desktop anyway.
The excessive layering in the Start menu can be just as annoying as having a message that is a far out on a thread as this on. You only want to look so far for something before getting ticked.
If there was a limit to how far down a layer in a menu could go then it would be great.
Personally I like how Enlightenment allows for three different menus depending on which button you click. It keeps things relatively close.
Have you ever dealt with a NT system with a relatively new Service Pack installed on it? It isn't a pretty sight at times. Service Pack 4 was very unstable for quite some time, and actually broke NT in the early versions. I know people that have refused to put on a service pack until it is one rev. back because of really bad experiences they have had with Service Packs 1-4. MS knew better than to put SP5 on the system, realizing that it would probably cause it to be less stable.
If SP5 had been up for the challenge MS would have used it. If you are using SP5, I suggest you do as MS did, and not use it for now.
1) I really don't see how this strategy is any different than any other FUD strategy composed by MS. They are admitting that Apache is better than IIE, and that they have something that is going to be better coming out really soon. They are just trying to keep their IIE people loyal for another X years, until Win 2000 comes out. I think they are seeing a trend of people running away from IIE and towards Apache and they are just trying to keep that from happening with this "Windows 2000 will solve this problem" line.
2) Knowing MS, the number of bugs, err, special features, that they have in the first release of a new MS product will probably be overwhelming. Especially if they try to create something that is small, effeciant, and fast. Those three adjectives don't fit MS in any way. It will be a while before anything of any substance comes out.
3) We are all working on speculation. MS is playing with peoples minds, and we, including me, are letting ourselves get caught up in it. Our first priority should be to fix the problems that we had during the Mindcraft experiment, and then keep rolling on. We are already picking up steam, gaining a lot of support, and a lot of press coverage. The easiest way for MS to destroy OSS is to change our focus. If we spend our time guessing at what MS is going to do next and then trying to counter-act it we will have lost the original goal of OSS, and may not accomplish what needs to be done.
Sticks and stones may break our bones but FUD can never hurt us.
It is good to hear that #9 has finally decided to help out and get their Revolution IV fully functional with Linux. I was going to get one at one point but didn't see any support for it in Linux and so I tabled the idea. In fact I am about a week or two away from buying a new video card and it is nice to see even more freedom in my choice.
My guess is that they realized that it is the Linux users who build their own computer, who look for than just gaming power in a video card, which is what the Rev IV is, and are more likely to take the time to pull apart their machine to upgrade. It is a smart business move on their part to give support to Linux.
Chances are very good that S3 is going to be moving to join the bandwagon soon. With a couple big name companies like Matrox and #9 already supporting Linux, and if they have any market research they will join up soon. They are probably spending too much time working on the buyout/merger with Diamond right now to make another major move like support Linux. It is only a matter of time before they support Linux anyway, any graphics company that keeps up with their market research will realize that the Linux community spends a disproportionate amount of money upgrading their computers to the latest and greatest stuff compaired to the average Joe Shmo Windows user. To not cater to the power user is a fatal flaw for any computer periferal company like S3.
Here is an interesting question that really doesn't have much to do with the article but oh well.
When, as in what is the average age of the person, does someone switch over to Linux from MS?
From what I can tell there are a lot of people in the Linux community that are in college. My guess is that there is probably a disproportionate amount of Linux users to MS users in the college scene. I know that at the college that I go to, a great deal of the engineering students have gotten really ticked at MS and NT and there seems to be a very large number that are switching over to Linux.
One of the big reasons is that there are quite a few labs for upper division classes are run with SPARC stations, and with ethernet connections in the dorms students have found that it is easier to get Linux on their box. They just ssh over to the lab and work from their room. You can't get nearly seamless connection between two computers with NT, especially if the one that is the important one is running Solaris.
Very true, MS is very capable of improving their product in order to stay alive. A really good example of this is the MS vs Borland battles. I have been working with WordPerfect since the days that Borland coupled it with Quattro Pro. This combination caused MS to improve Word and Excel very rapidly in order to compete with Borland. Although I still think WordPerfect is a far superior word processor than Word, I do have to conceed that Excel is infact a better spreadsheet than Quattro Pro at this time, but I still use Quattro Pro.
Over the past couple of years there hasn't been much of a threat to MS and so they have really let their OS and several of their other products to become very very bloated and sloppy because they haven't needed to drastically improve them in order to mantain a strangle hold on the market. Linux has shown, is showing, and will continue to show itself to be a very imposing threat to MS. They aren't going to sit on their behinds and watch us pass them by without a battle.
NT will improve, quickly. To be ignorant of MS's ability to improve a product with the amount of resources that they have would be a mistake.
Shall we overcome? I am going to say yes, in time. Will future battle be easy? Definately not. MS is preparing for war and considering what has happened to Borland, err Inprise, and OS/2 that should not be taken lightly.
There is a good reason why HotJava 3 hasn't been updated in a long time, and it ISN'T because Sun is working on a new release. Trust me friend, that road is a dead end.
I think the idea of offering wider platform support would probably be well advised, especially for Sparc stations. I was kind of hoping to see how good it does with XML but I wasn't able to get it to work on my Ultra here at work.
I do understand that it is Pre-ALPHA ware but with there being a Sun-Netscape aliance one would think that with this being the sucessor of Netscape 4.x there might be something for Solaris on SparcStations.
Oh well, can't get everything you want in life now can ya. Well, not yet.
I could be wrong, so you probably want to do some more homework on this, but from what I have read about the K(6-3 &7) vs PIII chips is that if that are a lot of processes demanding very intense floating point calculations AMD will generally tend to lag. Creating the number of processes that it takes to do this is not easy to do. From what I hear it is nearly impossible to do it on a machine with only one user on it at a time.
As for the K6-2, it is slower on floating point calculations in general.
They are all really good processors, and if you aren't setting up a server with several dumb terms around all doing ray-tracing and very large and complex PERL apps, you should be fine.
I think that K7 can be trademarked, I'm not sure. I do know that just plain old numbers cannot. I have to agree with one of the earlier comments about naming the chip so that the mainstream can identify.
I have a hunch if AMD is really doing this, and as I mentioned before I have found no info on the AMD web site about renaming their chip, we should probably expect some large scale marketing from them on the release of the chip. They need to bring themselves out of the shadow of Intel, and the way they are going to do that is with advertising. I may not be a marketer, but I do know that catchy words like "Athlon" stick in the heads of the mass market which is what AMD needs to thrive.
I think it is kind of strange that AMD hasn't mentioned this at all on their web page.
Actually I believe it was because you can't trademark just a number.
Yes, Einstein did work very hard, and accomplished a great deal for physics. The TV's we have today, and mircoprocessors wouldn't be possible without Quantum theory. But we should never forget that although Einstein pioneered the quantum field, he also quickly disowned it due to religious beliefs. Not only that, but it took a Catholic priest/physicist to convince him that the universe was in fact expanding and to take that stupid constant out of his theory of general relativity. Although he was a genius, it took many more geniuses to fight him in order to prevent him from really messing up his theories.
As for this "5%" bunk. We use more than 90%, the discussion of 5% only deals with the idea of when we are doing a certain process, ie some hard math problem. Also, that is only for guys. It is a known fact that when men concentrate on a problem small sections of the brain are used very heavily, where women use a larger percentage of the brain but less intensly.
Another good one from MS is from Word 3.0 to Word 95. If you look at the headers there is a string that says Word 6. And one of the patches for Word 97 changed a string in the headers from Word 7 to Word 8. Funny how a patch can constitute a whole new release number in the header. :) or perhaps MS's release numbers in Word are for tracking when they released something to fix the "bug" of WordPerfect being able to convert the files over?
Just a thought.
If you really look at Solaris 7 you will see that it is really Solaris 2.7, they didn't just decide to make such a leap to go from 2.6 to 7.
Correct me if I am wrong, but isn't the test server a multiprocessor x86 machine that costs >$10000?
Frankly, I don't see why everyone is so worked up over a test like this. Any company that is setting up a server, whether it be a web server or whatever, and is willing to spend that much money is going to do some homework before they go out and buy something. Anyone in the computer industry knows that with that kind of money more powerful machines start to really enter into the field, like Alphas, Ultras, and SGI workstations. All of which, when loaded with Linux or their respective OS, will beat out a x86 machine loaded with MS any day of the week.
As for companies that aren't as computer savy, Linux's older cousins like Sun, SGI, and SCO have extensive marketing teams who's job is to show the customer what is out there at that price.
If MS wants to conduct feel good tests in order to improve moral in their company, fine, I could care less.
As for porting Office 2000 onto Linux. I hope they don't port that piece over to Linux. Even if they do, who is going to spend money, year after year, on junk like that when Corel is giving out a better word processor for free?