I don't think it's fair to say Red Hat screwed up. They are still the number one commercial Linux vendor by a large margin, and their closest (only?) competitor, Novell, started immitating their Linux business model (free 'testbed' version, paid commercial offering).
As far as I can tell, Canonical is mostly a charity funded by Shuttleworth. It is not operating under the same financial constraints as a public company with shareholders like Red Hat and Novell.
The constitution gives *Congress* the power "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries". It does not encumber in any way, shape, or form, the way Authors and Inventors make their Writings and Discoveries available to the public.
I predict all those indignant Democratic senators (Leahy, Feinstein) will now fade back into the woodwork. Nobody in congress acts on principle anymore. Leadership, that cornerstone requirement of *representative* democracy, is sorely lacking in the face of all this near-continuous polling.
Frankly, 5 years between textbook editions for a field as young as computer engineering seems reasonable. And being required to update your lecture notes ("spending many hours") once every 5 years is not too much of a burden.
And you can tell those that complain that you're "in bed with textbook reps" to shove it.
Apple isn't in the OS X business, they are in the computer hardware business.
I know this is considered a truism around here, but I think there's a case to be made that Apple is turning itself around into a software company:
1) The reason Apple lost the OS war to Microsoft in the 1990s, despite having the superior OS, is because of the strategic mistake of tying their software to their hardware. Perhaps with another superior OS on their hands, they don't want to repeat the same mistake.
2) Apple switched to an x86 architecture. Within a few months, WinXP is booting on that architecture. Can Apple even prevent OS X from eventually booting on a beige box? They must've known this is a likely outcome, so why shift architectures if they weren't actually planning for it?
3) Hardware margins will always be low: differentiation is hard to maintain, especially in a mature platform like PCs and laptops. Software margins, by contrast, are huge.
Apple has a small window, with XP aging and Vista delayed and requiring major hardware upgrades to take advantage of its advanced features. They can make their software play now, or forever keep their 5% niche market. I guess we'll see in the next few months
These numbers beg to differ. People have a habit of projecting their personal opinions, or what might work for an enthusiast desktop/server, on the rest of the professional world. In fact, the professional Linux world has pretty much two players: Red Hat and Novell, and despite what Distrowatch rankings might imply, Red Hat has been consolidating its lead.
Because there are 100 times as many PCs in existence as there are Macs? And because Apple makes a mint every time they sell a copy of OSX, whether it's on Apple hardware or not?
Only on slahsdot would the GP be labeled 'fucking asinine' and the P modded insightful!
I think you're absolutely correct. The real profit margins are in software, where each additional sale has near-zero marginal costs, and where your innovations are better protected from market competition (it's easy to copy Apple hardware, not so easy to copy OSX features). Apple made the mistake in the 80s and 90s of tying its then superior operating system to its hardware. As a result, it lost to Microsoft, bigtime. I can't imagine they'd want to make the same mistake again with OSX.
It may be too late anyway. I don't know if OSX has a chance beyond its niche against Windows. Being better is never enough in a market with huge network effects and an entrenched player.
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries" - Article I, Section 8, US Constitution.
The reason for granting time-limited exclusivity (patents, copyrights) is not that innovators have a right to protect an investment, as the GP says. The reason is that without time-limited exclusivity, there would be a lot less incentive for innovators to innovate in the first place. This is especially true for innovations that require a substantial investment of time and money.
To the extent that certain innovations do not require this investment, they are less deserving of exclusivity. Society as a whole gains when a drug company finds it worth its while to spend a billion dollars to develop a new drug that they can patent and sell above cost for a limited time (until generics enter). But society loses (from lack of competition as you point out) from patenting innovations of the "wouldn't it be cool if..." variety, the type you can 'innovate' in a single evening while having a beer with your buddies.
Is there a big barrier to doing the converse, i.e. running OS X on commodity x86 hardware? If the answer is no, then does this imply that Apple is completely changing its business model from integrated software/hardware to independent software and hardware?
After-market copying and distribution among friends have always been available with CDs and VCRs, but it was never important enough to make the **AA implement DRM. The DRM panic only ensued with Napster and the p2p model of distribution, where 'peer' does not mean 'friend' [1].
My question therefore remains: how does DRM solve the problem it was intended to address when non-DRM versions of almost everything exist (and will continue to exist) in p2p and usenet?
[1] The MPAA did in fact panic with the introduction of the VCR, with litigation leading to the famous Betamax supreme court decision. But their panic obviously proved completely short-sighted from a business point of view.
What would happen if the **AA allowed Google to launch a music/movie service *without* DRM? The vast majority of material on legitimate services like iTunes is available DRM-free on the p2p networks and usenet. But people still use iTunes because it's more convenient and not legally risky.
Would iTunes or any other legitimate music/movie service be *less* successful without DRM? I don't think so. Which begs the question: what's the **AA's business case for DRM?
The problem with standard classification schemes (Dewey-Decimal, LoC) is that they were designed at a time when *physical* search was important. You asked the librarian where the books on topic X are located, then you browsed the actual shelves for the books of interest.
As recently as 10 years ago, the only thing that had changed was that instead of asking a librarian, you queried the 'electronic' card catalogue at the library, got a few locations, then, again, went to browse the actual shelves for useful books.
Electronic databases with useful metadata and search have changed all this. If you wanted a book on a particular subject, you'd search Google or Amazon and create your reading list while sitting at your computer. The only *physical* function remaining is to retrieve the books on your list.
In this environment, you could literally index the books randomly to numbers (book #1, book #2, etc) and organize them in ascending order on the shelves. All relevant search info would be in a database you could query on your computer.
As for the database, it seems like such a natural candidate for a community effort like the (original) IMDB or CDDB (now gracenote) that there must (should?) be something out there already.
I was recently evaluating distros to install on my home server, and I basically realized that all the 'distros that matter' are converging. The big split used to be Gnome vs KDE, and it seems Gnome is winning as the standard. Add OpenOffice, Firefox, and Evolution, and you'd be hard-pressed to distinguish one desktop distro from another, except by the version numbers of the packages.
Yes, there's still an rpm-deb split, but with apt and yum, it's all the same to the end user. The server software suite is basically identical. The 'distros that matter' all offer regular patches and easy core updates/upgrades, and documentation is improving across the board.
I was going to install Ubuntu breezy, but then realized I lose nothing by going with Fedora Core 5. I just get the latest versions of the standard software available now. I'm sure if I were installing in May, Ubuntu dapper would be the natural choice. I wonder if within a year, the only question remaining will be: do you prefer brown themes or blue themes?
I don't understand Groklaw's beef. She (PJ) was asked two questions. Her first answer was one of the main points of the article: hierarchy is an integral part of successful open source development. Her second answer was a dodge: "You think Wikipedia is bad? The MSM is worse!". As for the factual inaccuracies, what exactly were they? The fact that the author didn't get the "groklaw-approved" exact wording right for telling us SCO is suing IBM, DaimlerChrysler and Autozone? Give me a break.
Perhaps I'm biased against Groklaw. Sometimes I can't take the world-weary, sighing, 'know all the answers', 'the rest of the world is idiotic' tone of the postings there. I'm sure I'll be punished accordingly by groklaw fans with mod points, but what use is good Karma if you can't cash it in once in a while?:)
And what do Gnomes have to do with Software?
on
Ekiga 2.0 Released
·
· Score: 1
And what does Apache have to do with webserving? or Firefox with browsing? I can't believe people are bitching about the name. You left out Linux, Debian (is Ian still going out with Deb?), Gnome, and Gimp, and are picking on Ekiga?!
I only stated that religion drove the formation of the empire, which in turn made it possible for invention to thrive. You yourself called them "Islamic centers of excellence". Whether the inventions were carried out by Muslims, Christians, Jews, or Atheists is not my point.
I also stated that religion may have provided the direct motive for certain inventions. This is a value-free statement, like saying WWII provided the direct motive for innovations in atomic energy. Or that ancient Egyptian religion drove the building of the pyramids and temples that survive to the present day.
The association of these inventions to a religion comes from the fact that Islam was the uniting force that led to the formation of an empire. This probably resulted in economic growth and the formation of markets that made these inventions possible.
Some of the inventions may have been spurred directly by religious motives. I'm sure the interest in astronomy had to do with the adoption of a lunar calendar and the need to determine prayer times, for example. Other inventions probably had more to do with what I mentioned in the first paragraph: the existence of a growing, stable economy in the empire.
This analysis makes more sense when dealing with software, but not hardware. There's no network externality to owning an iPod: Everyone owning an iPod doesn't make it useful/necessary for me to own one as well, and doesn't penalize me for owning an iPodKiller (unlike, say Microsoft Office). And please don't mention 'accessories'; I suppose having 100 different styles of cases is nice, but I only need one.
There's a legion of buyers out there who want a portable mp3 player but don't use iTunes. They're buying iPods because it's the best hardware on the market. But give them something just as sleek, with longer battery life, an FM tuner, multi-format playback, and a better price, and there's no reason for them not to buy it.
This is a real question to those who have spent more time thinking about this and have a better understanding. My impression was that RMS is trying to respond to the possibility, courtesy of DRM and 'Trusted Computing', that a company could take GPL software, make (and publish) modifications, then release a version that cannot be modified further and still run. This would transform GPL software to a 'Look But Don't Tinker' variety. After a while, for example, you wouldn't be able to meaningfully branch a project. Is this about right? If so, is the fight about this goal of GPL3 or the particular methods/language it uses?
When it comes to outsourcing discussions, Slashdot is at its populist worst. No one wants to explain why it's ok to buy PC hardware from Taiwan, but not PC software from India (outsourcing is simply importing a service, and there's no meaningful difference between it and importing goods). And no one wants to explain why, despite all the wailing and gnashing of teeth about outsourcing, unemployment numbers look like they do here:
What's the legal environment for publishing websites in the Arab world? You may be able to answer this only for Jordan, but can the government ask for records (real name, logs, etc) to be turned over regarding any individual poster/blogger? As a practical matter, do governments bother with censoring/harrassing critical posters?
Slashdot Mirror
I was going to submit the following Salon article to the front page, but this will have to do
n sa/index_np.html
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2006/06/21/att_
You have to wonder if the two stories are related.
I don't think it's fair to say Red Hat screwed up. They are still the number one commercial Linux vendor by a large margin, and their closest (only?) competitor, Novell, started immitating their Linux business model (free 'testbed' version, paid commercial offering).
As far as I can tell, Canonical is mostly a charity funded by Shuttleworth. It is not operating under the same financial constraints as a public company with shareholders like Red Hat and Novell.
The constitution gives *Congress* the power "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries". It does not encumber in any way, shape, or form, the way Authors and Inventors make their Writings and Discoveries available to the public.
I predict all those indignant Democratic senators (Leahy, Feinstein) will now fade back into the woodwork. Nobody in congress acts on principle anymore. Leadership, that cornerstone requirement of *representative* democracy, is sorely lacking in the face of all this near-continuous polling.
Frankly, 5 years between textbook editions for a field as young as computer engineering seems reasonable. And being required to update your lecture notes ("spending many hours") once every 5 years is not too much of a burden.
And you can tell those that complain that you're "in bed with textbook reps" to shove it.
I know this is considered a truism around here, but I think there's a case to be made that Apple is turning itself around into a software company:
1) The reason Apple lost the OS war to Microsoft in the 1990s, despite having the superior OS, is because of the strategic mistake of tying their software to their hardware. Perhaps with another superior OS on their hands, they don't want to repeat the same mistake.
2) Apple switched to an x86 architecture. Within a few months, WinXP is booting on that architecture. Can Apple even prevent OS X from eventually booting on a beige box? They must've known this is a likely outcome, so why shift architectures if they weren't actually planning for it?
3) Hardware margins will always be low: differentiation is hard to maintain, especially in a mature platform like PCs and laptops. Software margins, by contrast, are huge.
Apple has a small window, with XP aging and Vista delayed and requiring major hardware upgrades to take advantage of its advanced features. They can make their software play now, or forever keep their 5% niche market. I guess we'll see in the next few months
People are giving up on Redhat
These numbers beg to differ. People have a habit of projecting their personal opinions, or what might work for an enthusiast desktop/server, on the rest of the professional world. In fact, the professional Linux world has pretty much two players: Red Hat and Novell, and despite what Distrowatch rankings might imply, Red Hat has been consolidating its lead.
Quick, someone phone Bill Gates back in the 1980s to tell him his idea of creating a $300 billion company will fail! Because of piracy!
Because there are 100 times as many PCs in existence as there are Macs? And because Apple makes a mint every time they sell a copy of OSX, whether it's on Apple hardware or not?
Only on slahsdot would the GP be labeled 'fucking asinine' and the P modded insightful!
I think you're absolutely correct. The real profit margins are in software, where each additional sale has near-zero marginal costs, and where your innovations are better protected from market competition (it's easy to copy Apple hardware, not so easy to copy OSX features). Apple made the mistake in the 80s and 90s of tying its then superior operating system to its hardware. As a result, it lost to Microsoft, bigtime. I can't imagine they'd want to make the same mistake again with OSX.
It may be too late anyway. I don't know if OSX has a chance beyond its niche against Windows. Being better is never enough in a market with huge network effects and an entrenched player.
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries" - Article I, Section 8, US Constitution.
..." variety, the type you can 'innovate' in a single evening while having a beer with your buddies.
The reason for granting time-limited exclusivity (patents, copyrights) is not that innovators have a right to protect an investment, as the GP says. The reason is that without time-limited exclusivity, there would be a lot less incentive for innovators to innovate in the first place. This is especially true for innovations that require a substantial investment of time and money.
To the extent that certain innovations do not require this investment, they are less deserving of exclusivity. Society as a whole gains when a drug company finds it worth its while to spend a billion dollars to develop a new drug that they can patent and sell above cost for a limited time (until generics enter). But society loses (from lack of competition as you point out) from patenting innovations of the "wouldn't it be cool if
Is there a big barrier to doing the converse, i.e. running OS X on commodity x86 hardware? If the answer is no, then does this imply that Apple is completely changing its business model from integrated software/hardware to independent software and hardware?
After-market copying and distribution among friends have always been available with CDs and VCRs, but it was never important enough to make the **AA implement DRM. The DRM panic only ensued with Napster and the p2p model of distribution, where 'peer' does not mean 'friend' [1].
My question therefore remains: how does DRM solve the problem it was intended to address when non-DRM versions of almost everything exist (and will continue to exist) in p2p and usenet?
[1] The MPAA did in fact panic with the introduction of the VCR, with litigation leading to the famous Betamax supreme court decision. But their panic obviously proved completely short-sighted from a business point of view.
What would happen if the **AA allowed Google to launch a music/movie service *without* DRM? The vast majority of material on legitimate services like iTunes is available DRM-free on the p2p networks and usenet. But people still use iTunes because it's more convenient and not legally risky.
Would iTunes or any other legitimate music/movie service be *less* successful without DRM? I don't think so. Which begs the question: what's the **AA's business case for DRM?
Get yourself a copy of Portable OpenOffice.org and a thumbdrive, and you're much better off than relying on Ajax and an internet connection.
The problem with standard classification schemes (Dewey-Decimal, LoC) is that they were designed at a time when *physical* search was important. You asked the librarian where the books on topic X are located, then you browsed the actual shelves for the books of interest.
As recently as 10 years ago, the only thing that had changed was that instead of asking a librarian, you queried the 'electronic' card catalogue at the library, got a few locations, then, again, went to browse the actual shelves for useful books.
Electronic databases with useful metadata and search have changed all this. If you wanted a book on a particular subject, you'd search Google or Amazon and create your reading list while sitting at your computer. The only *physical* function remaining is to retrieve the books on your list.
In this environment, you could literally index the books randomly to numbers (book #1, book #2, etc) and organize them in ascending order on the shelves. All relevant search info would be in a database you could query on your computer.
As for the database, it seems like such a natural candidate for a community effort like the (original) IMDB or CDDB (now gracenote) that there must (should?) be something out there already.
I was recently evaluating distros to install on my home server, and I basically realized that all the 'distros that matter' are converging. The big split used to be Gnome vs KDE, and it seems Gnome is winning as the standard. Add OpenOffice, Firefox, and Evolution, and you'd be hard-pressed to distinguish one desktop distro from another, except by the version numbers of the packages.
Yes, there's still an rpm-deb split, but with apt and yum, it's all the same to the end user. The server software suite is basically identical. The 'distros that matter' all offer regular patches and easy core updates/upgrades, and documentation is improving across the board.
I was going to install Ubuntu breezy, but then realized I lose nothing by going with Fedora Core 5. I just get the latest versions of the standard software available now. I'm sure if I were installing in May, Ubuntu dapper would be the natural choice. I wonder if within a year, the only question remaining will be: do you prefer brown themes or blue themes?
I don't understand Groklaw's beef. She (PJ) was asked two questions. Her first answer was one of the main points of the article: hierarchy is an integral part of successful open source development. Her second answer was a dodge: "You think Wikipedia is bad? The MSM is worse!". As for the factual inaccuracies, what exactly were they? The fact that the author didn't get the "groklaw-approved" exact wording right for telling us SCO is suing IBM, DaimlerChrysler and Autozone? Give me a break.
:)
Perhaps I'm biased against Groklaw. Sometimes I can't take the world-weary, sighing, 'know all the answers', 'the rest of the world is idiotic' tone of the postings there. I'm sure I'll be punished accordingly by groklaw fans with mod points, but what use is good Karma if you can't cash it in once in a while?
And what does Apache have to do with webserving? or Firefox with browsing? I can't believe people are bitching about the name. You left out Linux, Debian (is Ian still going out with Deb?), Gnome, and Gimp, and are picking on Ekiga?!
I only stated that religion drove the formation of the empire, which in turn made it possible for invention to thrive. You yourself called them "Islamic centers of excellence". Whether the inventions were carried out by Muslims, Christians, Jews, or Atheists is not my point.
I also stated that religion may have provided the direct motive for certain inventions. This is a value-free statement, like saying WWII provided the direct motive for innovations in atomic energy. Or that ancient Egyptian religion drove the building of the pyramids and temples that survive to the present day.
The association of these inventions to a religion comes from the fact that Islam was the uniting force that led to the formation of an empire. This probably resulted in economic growth and the formation of markets that made these inventions possible.
Some of the inventions may have been spurred directly by religious motives. I'm sure the interest in astronomy had to do with the adoption of a lunar calendar and the need to determine prayer times, for example. Other inventions probably had more to do with what I mentioned in the first paragraph: the existence of a growing, stable economy in the empire.
This analysis makes more sense when dealing with software, but not hardware. There's no network externality to owning an iPod: Everyone owning an iPod doesn't make it useful/necessary for me to own one as well, and doesn't penalize me for owning an iPodKiller (unlike, say Microsoft Office). And please don't mention 'accessories'; I suppose having 100 different styles of cases is nice, but I only need one.
There's a legion of buyers out there who want a portable mp3 player but don't use iTunes. They're buying iPods because it's the best hardware on the market. But give them something just as sleek, with longer battery life, an FM tuner, multi-format playback, and a better price, and there's no reason for them not to buy it.
This is a real question to those who have spent more time thinking about this and have a better understanding. My impression was that RMS is trying to respond to the possibility, courtesy of DRM and 'Trusted Computing', that a company could take GPL software, make (and publish) modifications, then release a version that cannot be modified further and still run. This would transform GPL software to a 'Look But Don't Tinker' variety. After a while, for example, you wouldn't be able to meaningfully branch a project. Is this about right? If so, is the fight about this goal of GPL3 or the particular methods/language it uses?
When it comes to outsourcing discussions, Slashdot is at its populist worst. No one wants to explain why it's ok to buy PC hardware from Taiwan, but not PC software from India (outsourcing is simply importing a service, and there's no meaningful difference between it and importing goods). And no one wants to explain why, despite all the wailing and gnashing of teeth about outsourcing, unemployment numbers look like they do here:
http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/surveymost?bls
(select the 4th item and have them draw a graph for you!)
What's the legal environment for publishing websites in the Arab world? You may be able to answer this only for Jordan, but can the government ask for records (real name, logs, etc) to be turned over regarding any individual poster/blogger? As a practical matter, do governments bother with censoring/harrassing critical posters?