There's something in what he says
on
The New IT Crisis
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
It all sounds a lot like what IBM's Sam Palmisano was preaching back in October, about "eBusiness on demand".
The idea that impressed me then was the thought that nobody would seriously consider generating their own electricity now that it's a utility. But back in the early days companies and communities did just that. Same thing today with computing, but tomorrow...
It strikes me there's a shade more to IBM's vision than there is to Andreessen's, though. Check out the IBM version here, with links to some more in-depth material.
Sorry, I fail to see your argument. You simply cannot buy a computer from this vendor unless it leaves their shop with Windows on the hard drive. I don't see how that is substantively different from "it comes with Windows, buy it or f**k off."
The tragedy is that they build excellent PCs from good quality components that mostly would have no difficulty running Linux. In fact I bought one from them a couple of years ago that is now happily running Mandrake 9.0.
I can understand that they might feel unable to support Linux - maybe they don't have people with the necessary skills and maybe they're right that the market demand is not there to make it worth their while.
But many, even most potential buyers who want to run Linux are able and willing - and prefer - to install it themselves, to get their favourite distribution. These people would probably quite happily sign away the ability to call the vendor's helpdesk with software problems if the vendor would supply the system at a discount without an OS.
I also don't see that doing this (i.e. shipping a PC with no OS) in any way implicates the PC vendor in software piracy. Indeed as far as I'm concerned they can tell Microsoft I bought a bare PC - let MS go to the expense of auditing me if they want to waste their money.
Here's an example of the lame reasons an otherwise good UK vendor of PCs offers for why they will not ship you a machine without Windows on it.
I suspect they omit another significant reason: "We are compelled by our contract with Microsoft to pay them a royalty for every machine we manufacture, so we need you to pay for it."
The XDA from O2 - a combination Pocket PC PDA and GSM/GPRS phone manufactured by the Taiwanese company HTC and also offered by various other telcos around the world - similarly fails, in my view, to deliver on its promise.
It's neither a good enough phone, nor a good enough PDA. The things it's best for in my view, are reading eBooks (MS Reader is very impressive), and MP3 playing, assuming you have a large enough SD card. But there are cheaper and better solutions for each of those things.
Personally, I'd far rather have a two-box solution comprising a good, triband, GPRS-enabled cellphone with onboard Bluetooth such as the Nokia 6310i or Sony-Ericsson T68i, together with a Bluetooth enabled PDA like the Palm Tungsten T. That way you get a great phone and a great PDA that actually work together, as opposed to something that can't make up its mind what it is and doesn't do anything really well.
Actually the pr0n industry has been a major driver of much technological innovation -- 8mm movies, VCR, the Internet. I'd be surprised if they don't turn out to be play a similar role in future.
Similar material on old IBM systems..
on
Old Computers Exhibit
·
· Score: 2, Informative
This judgement appears to have given them their head, but will it go to their head and cause them to repeat the mistakes IBM made, as suggested by John Lettice in this article in The Register?
Re:XDocs is just a modern clone of Lotus Notes
on
Microsoft takes on PDF
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I have to say I strongly agree with this - that XDocs is far more of a threat to Lotus Notes (and Domino) than it is to PDF. I know it's fashionable on/. to rubbish Notes as a piss-poor email client, but IBM/Lotus have millions of customers out there using it. Many observers consider that Notes is the jewel in Lotus' crown that convinced IBM to buy the company. MS have long aspired to duplicate the function of Notes but so far all their efforts (mostly in the shape of Exchange) have foundered because while Exchange/Outlook may do email marginally better than Domino/Notes, the MS products struggle to deliver rapid development of collaborative applications that integrate into that email backbone.
Just read what MS say about it. XDocs is a client-side forms-based application that communicates with a back-end server that stores and shares documents. Sounds a hell of a lot like Notes/Domino to me. And with a well-architected use of XML and the Office franchise to back it, it should be well able to give Lotus a good run for their money, the 15+ year headstart that Lotus have on such solutions nothwithstanding.
By the way, there was an article about this in The Register three weeks ago when MS announced it.
I've been working on a spam tool in Lotus Notes (I know, but it's what we have to use where I work) that uses the same underlying methods. I've designed it to be outboard of the mail database, and it's "pure" Notes so should run on any supported platform.
I have it pretty much working now, and it is uncanny how well it sorts the spam from the rest of the stuff. Using even a very dumb tokenizer, the thing catches 95% or more of the spam, and so far the only false positives have been a result of miscategorized stuff in the input corpus -- i.e. I had filed something as spam that was not spam, and the filter started recognizing similar stuff as spam. That actually looks like one of the main possible failure modes for this approach.
Another of my concerns is that there are so many possible tweaks to these algorithms (mainly various ways of tuning the tokenizer, but also whether to focus on specific elements of messages, what to do with URLs, HTML comments, etc.) that could make a difference to the filter's performance.
I'm seeing a lot of interest from colleagues at work, and I'm starting to share it with them. If/when it feels mature enough, I may be able to get permission to release it to the outside world too. (Mine is a private, one-man project, but done on company time and with company resources, so they get first call on it.)
It looks like the noise from the anti-MS contingent has helped to get MS off perhaps more lightly than they might have done: Kollar-Kotelly takes the plaintiffs to task for exaggerating the significance of Microsoft's wrongdoings, and for proposing remedies which would be inappropriate -- "Plaintiffs have shown little respect for the parameters of liability that were so precisely delineated by the appellate court." (Opinion P200).
Notes is the Lotus desktop client. You'd have to compare that to Outlook, and I agree that against Outlook Notes looks bloated, but only if you regard it as a "simple" mail client. Actually the full Notes client does a lot more than just email. It's the client end for client-server applications, the server being Lotus Domino, which in fact compares quite favourably with Exchange. And it runs on Linux (and Solaris and IBM iSeries and zSeries as well as Windows).
And here's another thing you might not know: you can use Domino as the server and Outlook as the client. Yes! So users who are seduced by the slick look & feel of the MS product can continue to use that POS, and the IT manager has the comfort of knowing that the host end is running a secure, scalable, proven application that he doesn't have to rip & replace each time Microsoft releases a new, incompatible and painful-to-upgrade-to version of Exchange.
I first came across this idea in Greg Bear's Eon, published in '85. It's some time since I read it, but I recall that it his ideas around this were well-developed, with such notions as "non-corporeal" persons having distinct rights; even the concept of new persons being "born" in a non-corporeal state and having to somehow earn the right to become embodied. Good read.
It's a good read, it really is. You don't actually get much of the true flavour of the report from the NYT article. I found myself getting more and more encouraged as I read it. The people on the commission were not your usual suspect anti-IP activists. They were regular establishment types, as far as I can see, and they really got it that current trends in IP in the developed world are causing continued repression in the developing world. Plus if you read between the lines you can convince yourself they are maybe having some second thoughts about its value in the developed world too.
This should be mandatory reading for the US Supreme Court justices sitting on Eldred v Ashcroft.
Suppose (if only for one nanosecond) that I accept the "benefits" of Palladium to me as a consumer. How much extra will I have to pay to get those benefits?
How much additional cost on the average PC - $1?, $5?, $50?, more? Then apart from the viewing fees for movies, audio tracks and other protected content that I can obviously choose to buy or not buy, what unavoidable ongoing costs will I have for registrations, software licenses, and the like? (Somehow I assume all the new versions of Windows and DRM-compliant programs are going to be rented to me rather than "sold".)
This looks to me like it could easily become a monopoly - albeit a complex one involving MS, content providers, certificate authorities, etc. Where are the elements of competition that will keep these prices down and foster innovation in this new secure world?
I can see why you think this based on the job you must have had in IBM, but sorry, I think you're wrong. You're thinking of services as the classic Customer Engineering discipline within IBM and yes, that is tied to hardware (not just IBM's hardware these days, by the way), but that's not the services that IBM sees as driving its future existence and (they hope) growth.
The services Sam Palmisano & Co are depending on range from business consulting (hence the PWCC merger), through all flavors of systems design, implementation and operations. IBM wants to be the full-service information systems provider of choice, all the way from business analysis through to running the backups.
And for the majority of that, hardware is a sideshow. It may be easier for IBM if you use their kit, and if you outsource your entire operation to them you should not be surprised to discover the machine rooms full of IBM boxes, but hardware is a commodity, and there's not enough revenue in it alone to sustain IBM or anyone else these days, so is no longer central to their plans.
Donald Norman used to talk sense - The Psychology of Everyday Things was and is a classic, but I simply don't understand how the same man can come up with such gratuitous falsehoods as his swipe at our great British doorhandles.
If there is any design flaw in this instance it clearly lies in the sleeve, not in the handle, as any fool can see. Plus there are plenty ways to design lever-type doorhandles that will not catch ill-fitting clothing.
American faucets? Surely he can't be serious in holding them up as exemplary? I well remember the first time I came across one of those vile, pull to open, push to close, twist to control the temperature shower controls. The cheesy faceted acrylic and gold-effect "plating" only served to reinforce my disgust.
Perhaps the young Donald had an equally unfortunate encounter with a doorhandle in his formative years?
IBM demo'ed collaborative work it was doing with the German white goods manufacturer Miele at the CeBit show in 2001. There is some information (in German) here. (If you don't do German, try a Babelfish translation.)
The way I see it, there's a two-tier provision of broadband in the UK.
You live in a relatively major conurbation: You want broadband? Yessir! certainly sir! ADSL? Cable? Wireless? Take your pick! How fast do you want it? 128kbps? 256kbps? 512kbps? faster still? you name it, you can get it. Whaddaya mean you don't want to pay those prices? C'mon you cheapskates! Switch to broadband!!!
You live anywhere else: You want broadband? You can whistle for it! What do you mean there aren't 400 or more people in your village (pop: 900) who will commit to subscribing? As you've no cable TV service either, that's not an option for you. You can have a satellite-based service for an outrageous installation fee plus a monthly fee that's about 4 times what a city-dweller pays for ADSL. You may be able to get ISDN (64kbps, for the about same price as ADSL in town). All those trees in the way mean you can't get our wireless service. You're out of luck, mate.
but I suspect that this is going turn out to be little more than a bargaining counter in Telstra's license fee negotiations with Microsoft.
And though we all know, in the words of the article, that "IBM, HP and Sun are all pushing Linux as an alternative to Windows for a corporate IT environment", those vendors' concern is principally to position it in the server space, and that mainly as a defensive strategy against the encroachment of Microsoft. I don't think any of them are ready to seriously push Linux as a desktop environment (yet).
Slashdot Mirror
It all sounds a lot like what IBM's Sam Palmisano was preaching back in October, about "eBusiness on demand".
The idea that impressed me then was the thought that nobody would seriously consider generating their own electricity now that it's a utility. But back in the early days companies and communities did just that. Same thing today with computing, but tomorrow...
It strikes me there's a shade more to IBM's vision than there is to Andreessen's, though. Check out the IBM version here, with links to some more in-depth material.
Sorry, I fail to see your argument. You simply cannot buy a computer from this vendor unless it leaves their shop with Windows on the hard drive. I don't see how that is substantively different from "it comes with Windows, buy it or f**k off."
The tragedy is that they build excellent PCs from good quality components that mostly would have no difficulty running Linux. In fact I bought one from them a couple of years ago that is now happily running Mandrake 9.0.
I can understand that they might feel unable to support Linux - maybe they don't have people with the necessary skills and maybe they're right that the market demand is not there to make it worth their while.
But many, even most potential buyers who want to run Linux are able and willing - and prefer - to install it themselves, to get their favourite distribution. These people would probably quite happily sign away the ability to call the vendor's helpdesk with software problems if the vendor would supply the system at a discount without an OS.
I also don't see that doing this (i.e. shipping a PC with no OS) in any way implicates the PC vendor in software piracy. Indeed as far as I'm concerned they can tell Microsoft I bought a bare PC - let MS go to the expense of auditing me if they want to waste their money.
Here's an example of the lame reasons an otherwise good UK vendor of PCs offers for why they will not ship you a machine without Windows on it.
I suspect they omit another significant reason: "We are compelled by our contract with Microsoft to pay them a royalty for every machine we manufacture, so we need you to pay for it."
It's a real shame this wasn't said by a real judge in a real case. *That* would change everything.
Actually, many Linux users browsing with Mozilla are likely to have disabled all pop-ups like these, so they simply wouldn't see them.
The XDA from O2 - a combination Pocket PC PDA and GSM/GPRS phone manufactured by the Taiwanese company HTC and also offered by various other telcos around the world - similarly fails, in my view, to deliver on its promise.
It's neither a good enough phone, nor a good enough PDA. The things it's best for in my view, are reading eBooks (MS Reader is very impressive), and MP3 playing, assuming you have a large enough SD card. But there are cheaper and better solutions for each of those things.
Personally, I'd far rather have a two-box solution comprising a good, triband, GPRS-enabled cellphone with onboard Bluetooth such as the Nokia 6310i or Sony-Ericsson T68i, together with a Bluetooth enabled PDA like the Palm Tungsten T. That way you get a great phone and a great PDA that actually work together, as opposed to something that can't make up its mind what it is and doesn't do anything really well.
Actually the pr0n industry has been a major driver of much technological innovation -- 8mm movies, VCR, the Internet. I'd be surprised if they don't turn out to be play a similar role in future.
available at IBM Archive
This judgement appears to have given them their head, but will it go to their head and cause them to repeat the mistakes IBM made, as suggested by John Lettice in this article in The Register?
I have to say I strongly agree with this - that XDocs is far more of a threat to Lotus Notes (and Domino) than it is to PDF. I know it's fashionable on /. to rubbish Notes as a piss-poor email client, but IBM/Lotus have millions of customers out there using it. Many observers consider that Notes is the jewel in Lotus' crown that convinced IBM to buy the company. MS have long aspired to duplicate the function of Notes but so far all their efforts (mostly in the shape of Exchange) have foundered because while Exchange/Outlook may do email marginally better than Domino/Notes, the MS products struggle to deliver rapid development of collaborative applications that integrate into that email backbone.
Just read what MS say about it. XDocs is a client-side forms-based application that communicates with a back-end server that stores and shares documents. Sounds a hell of a lot like Notes/Domino to me. And with a well-architected use of XML and the Office franchise to back it, it should be well able to give Lotus a good run for their money, the 15+ year headstart that Lotus have on such solutions nothwithstanding.
By the way, there was an article about this in The Register three weeks ago when MS announced it.
I've been working on a spam tool in Lotus Notes (I know, but it's what we have to use where I work) that uses the same underlying methods. I've designed it to be outboard of the mail database, and it's "pure" Notes so should run on any supported platform.
I have it pretty much working now, and it is uncanny how well it sorts the spam from the rest of the stuff. Using even a very dumb tokenizer, the thing catches 95% or more of the spam, and so far the only false positives have been a result of miscategorized stuff in the input corpus -- i.e. I had filed something as spam that was not spam, and the filter started recognizing similar stuff as spam. That actually looks like one of the main possible failure modes for this approach.
Another of my concerns is that there are so many possible tweaks to these algorithms (mainly various ways of tuning the tokenizer, but also whether to focus on specific elements of messages, what to do with URLs, HTML comments, etc.) that could make a difference to the filter's performance.
I'm seeing a lot of interest from colleagues at work, and I'm starting to share it with them. If/when it feels mature enough, I may be able to get permission to release it to the outside world too. (Mine is a private, one-man project, but done on company time and with company resources, so they get first call on it.)
It looks like the noise from the anti-MS contingent has helped to get MS off perhaps more lightly than they might have done: Kollar-Kotelly takes the plaintiffs to task for exaggerating the significance of Microsoft's wrongdoings, and for proposing remedies which would be inappropriate -- "Plaintiffs have shown little respect for the parameters of liability that were so precisely delineated by the appellate court." (Opinion P200).
Notes is the Lotus desktop client. You'd have to compare that to Outlook, and I agree that against Outlook Notes looks bloated, but only if you regard it as a "simple" mail client. Actually the full Notes client does a lot more than just email. It's the client end for client-server applications, the server being Lotus Domino, which in fact compares quite favourably with Exchange. And it runs on Linux (and Solaris and IBM iSeries and zSeries as well as Windows).
And here's another thing you might not know: you can use Domino as the server and Outlook as the client. Yes! So users who are seduced by the slick look & feel of the MS product can continue to use that POS, and the IT manager has the comfort of knowing that the host end is running a secure, scalable, proven application that he doesn't have to rip & replace each time Microsoft releases a new, incompatible and painful-to-upgrade-to version of Exchange.
I first came across this idea in Greg Bear's Eon, published in '85. It's some time since I read it, but I recall that it his ideas around this were well-developed, with such notions as "non-corporeal" persons having distinct rights; even the concept of new persons being "born" in a non-corporeal state and having to somehow earn the right to become embodied. Good read.
Don't fancy it myself.
You may find it more enlightening and certainly more amusing to read machine-translated Japanese, via Babelfish .
It's a good read, it really is. You don't actually get much of the true flavour of the report from the NYT article. I found myself getting more and more encouraged as I read it. The people on the commission were not your usual suspect anti-IP activists. They were regular establishment types, as far as I can see, and they really got it that current trends in IP in the developed world are causing continued repression in the developing world. Plus if you read between the lines you can convince yourself they are maybe having some second thoughts about its value in the developed world too.
This should be mandatory reading for the US Supreme Court justices sitting on Eldred v Ashcroft.
At the Commission on Intellectual Copyright website.
You can download the whole thing in PDF format, or browse online.
(btw I submitted a story about this over a month ago)
Suppose (if only for one nanosecond) that I accept the "benefits" of Palladium to me as a consumer. How much extra will I have to pay to get those benefits?
How much additional cost on the average PC - $1?, $5?, $50?, more? Then apart from the viewing fees for movies, audio tracks and other protected content that I can obviously choose to buy or not buy, what unavoidable ongoing costs will I have for registrations, software licenses, and the like? (Somehow I assume all the new versions of Windows and DRM-compliant programs are going to be rented to me rather than "sold".)
This looks to me like it could easily become a monopoly - albeit a complex one involving MS, content providers, certificate authorities, etc. Where are the elements of competition that will keep these prices down and foster innovation in this new secure world?
I can see why you think this based on the job you must have had in IBM, but sorry, I think you're wrong. You're thinking of services as the classic Customer Engineering discipline within IBM and yes, that is tied to hardware (not just IBM's hardware these days, by the way), but that's not the services that IBM sees as driving its future existence and (they hope) growth.
The services Sam Palmisano & Co are depending on range from business consulting (hence the PWCC merger), through all flavors of systems design, implementation and operations. IBM wants to be the full-service information systems provider of choice, all the way from business analysis through to running the backups.
And for the majority of that, hardware is a sideshow. It may be easier for IBM if you use their kit, and if you outsource your entire operation to them you should not be surprised to discover the machine rooms full of IBM boxes, but hardware is a commodity, and there's not enough revenue in it alone to sustain IBM or anyone else these days, so is no longer central to their plans.
Donald Norman used to talk sense - The Psychology of Everyday Things was and is a classic, but I simply don't understand how the same man can come up with such gratuitous falsehoods as his swipe at our great British doorhandles.
If there is any design flaw in this instance it clearly lies in the sleeve, not in the handle, as any fool can see. Plus there are plenty ways to design lever-type doorhandles that will not catch ill-fitting clothing.
American faucets? Surely he can't be serious in holding them up as exemplary? I well remember the first time I came across one of those vile, pull to open, push to close, twist to control the temperature shower controls. The cheesy faceted acrylic and gold-effect "plating" only served to reinforce my disgust.
Perhaps the young Donald had an equally unfortunate encounter with a doorhandle in his formative years?
RealOne? I can hardly wait for my cellphone to urge me to upgrade every time I place a call.
Sheesh.
IBM demo'ed collaborative work it was doing with the German white goods manufacturer Miele at the CeBit show in 2001. There is some information (in German) here. (If you don't do German, try a Babelfish translation.)
The way I see it, there's a two-tier provision of broadband in the UK.
You live in a relatively major conurbation: You want broadband? Yessir! certainly sir! ADSL? Cable? Wireless? Take your pick! How fast do you want it? 128kbps? 256kbps? 512kbps? faster still? you name it, you can get it. Whaddaya mean you don't want to pay those prices? C'mon you cheapskates! Switch to broadband!!!
You live anywhere else: You want broadband? You can whistle for it! What do you mean there aren't 400 or more people in your village (pop: 900) who will commit to subscribing? As you've no cable TV service either, that's not an option for you. You can have a satellite-based service for an outrageous installation fee plus a monthly fee that's about 4 times what a city-dweller pays for ADSL. You may be able to get ISDN (64kbps, for the about same price as ADSL in town). All those trees in the way mean you can't get our wireless service. You're out of luck, mate.
Obviously there's just no demand for it.
but I suspect that this is going turn out to be little more than a bargaining counter in Telstra's license fee negotiations with Microsoft.
And though we all know, in the words of the article, that "IBM, HP and Sun are all pushing Linux as an alternative to Windows for a corporate IT environment", those vendors' concern is principally to position it in the server space, and that mainly as a defensive strategy against the encroachment of Microsoft.
I don't think any of them are ready to seriously push Linux as a desktop environment (yet).