Here is the problem with most of the US armed forces: we haven't had any new designs since the 1970's. The F-15, F/A-18, F=16, AH-64, were all designed in the 1970's and deployed throughout the 1980's. Hell, the Harrier was designed in the 1960's. Well the major problem is with airframe fatiuge. There are only so many hours you can fly an F-15. The only new design is the Super Hornet, which is really just an upgraded F-18 design.
Furthermore, the current equipment with their upgrades are still equal too, if not superior to anything they might face in combat today. I think the EU are the only ones funding more advanced aircraft at the moment.
Lastly, the status of War-Fare has changed. The chances of us facing a well armed, trained air-force in air to air combat is almost nil. Opening hours of Gulf War I proved that its pretty well futile to do so. At most, the FA-22 was a stop gap measure and technology demostrator. Replace the airframes that are exiting due to fatigue and use it to demo new technology while the next geneartion of RPV's, UAV or what the next acrynom will be.
The V-22 was killed by the first Bush administration and reintroduced by Clinton. It's been a disaster since day one and most out siders agree serves no real purpose. But the question is, how much of the technology will find its way onto other projects? Expensive, yes, but most research is.
I also question how many Joint Strike Fighters will enter service as well. It is clear that remote vechciles are the next generation of weapons, but we need to do something to phase out/replace airframes while they are developed.
Google really helped with research papers couple years ago, but now I find there's too much spam. So much so, that now I'm into Grad studies, I am going to Lexis-Nexis to find out information about topics. Also I have found that the Internet is certianly not what it used to be either in terms of quality of content. There used to be a lot more academic sites appear when I searching for information on a topic. Now, especially being in an political science related field, International Affairs, doing a web search on some topics leads to dozens of ranting bloggers instead of more academic type work.
People love to say this, however the defense contracts are for development of weapon systems. Sure sometimes you have a few cost plus basic research contracts, but usually any resulting technology will take years before it can be added to the civilian market. Sure sometimes technologies developed for military use, say fly-by-wire, are adapted over, but often times anything developed for military use take 5 - 10 years or more before it can be deployed in civilian markets. The other major area is space stuff sponsored by NASA. Now its technology can almost be adapted, but a lot of their work is in satilite and rocket technology.
I grew up around the defense aircraft industry. My father is a retired executive from McDonnell Douglas (now Boeing), and let me tell you, the defense subsidy alalogy is pretty well false when it comes to the development of Civilian aircraft.
As I finish setting up out newest FreeBSD server retiring our last Linux box from operations. We run now 100% off some kind of BSD in our company. Some are OpenBSD servers, other FreeBSD, and we have one NetBSD running on an old 486DX with no real purpose other than we wanted to play with NetBSD.
We are 100% Macintosh on the desktop because I can then spend time on billable hour projects, not internal stuff. But generally speaking, I really just like how BSD, especially the ports system, is organized and managed. Linux has always been scattered brained with more distros that you can count, where as I like the core development teams in both Free & Open BSD.
When I used to run an online browser-based game system, we often had more people trying to beat the system than the game. Led to problems under Linux and since it was a hobby site that I maintianed on my spare time, I didn't have time to mess with keeping everything 100% uptodate. So I reset up the game on an OpenBSD platform. Sure it didn't scale as well, but had no sucessful breaches from the script kiddies.
Now that I work as a consultant with small and medium sized companies in this area, security has become a staple of my business. Most of my work is in Policy advising because we still see a lot of network breachs, a vast majority, having some kind of internal proceedure issue. Aka, someone calls saying they are from branch y and forgot a password and someone gives it to them or a disgruntled employee sells information to a competitor. Or worse yet, employee fired/let go and no one removes accesss to the system until after they're gone if at all. I have seen some companies that still have user accounts for people that haven't worked there in over 3 years.
Still these are mainly small businesses with less than 10 people that are in real estate or some service business where they might have a website, POS, Email, MS Office, and Quickbooks more than larger companies that have an actual IT guy or department (even then...I am amazed at the total lack of intelligence of some of the people with MSCE at the end of their business cards)
Still, the biggest threats are comming not on the server side, but client side with viruses and trojans galore. Its the average joe blow that opens every attachment they are sent that causes the bulk of problems from my perpective.
SG-1 is one of my favorite shows these days. That and the Simpsons are about the only shows I watch other than the News and Jay Leno. I've missed about 3 seasons while I was in college, but making it up when I catch a show in sydication now and then. One thing that made SG-1 cool was it was actually orginial. Sure, same old sci-fi themes, but the casting was a good mix and the writing has generally been fair as well. Richard Dean Anderson's character was a complete departure from the movie, but his character is pretty funny.
Too late for karma, but actually we've had a missle designed to destroy satilites in orbit for quite a while its called peguses, launched from an F-15 at about 60k feet if I remember correctly.
Back in the crazyness, I helped a friend get a website that promoted local merchants access to an online web mall and online storefront that actually was profitable and had made back 80% of the initial investment. This was circa 1999 when other services like Yahoo! stores weren't around and people wanted something quick and easy.
We were providing a service others needed at the time. Looking back with hindsight, I don't know how long it could have been sustainable, but it didn't really matter because a larger ISP in the city offered over USD 1M in stock and cash for the company. I took about $40,000 in cold hard cash and nothing in stock used it to pay off student loans and finish my last two years of college (I did this as a "summer internship"). Okay, I bought a new computer along with new Hockey pads, but There was no way our company was worth that amount of money. $250,000, yeah, that would have been a fair estimate. I think our first year revenue projection was about $200,000, but that's irrelevant. The other two took hundreds of thousands in stock that is worthless today because I think the company that bought us out went under in 2001.
However there is still money to be made on the interent. I now own/run a small company that owns a couple sites that still generate enough for me to pay the bills while in Grad School, so I consider it my part time job. My $850 a month stipen covers my rent, utlities, and food. But still, there was a need in the local community for this type of website so I started one. Spent some money on Google Ad Words and $50 on monthly adverts in a newsletter, and things are going well.
I also work as a consultant for others creating websites. Only get 1 or 2 jobs a year, but the average $1000 pays for a semester of classes almost...
At the earliest I see Linux being a viable option maybe by 2006 for the desktop market. Why? I've just finished helping about 50 clients in the past year with upgrading from computers purchased circa 1999/2000 and many actually switched to Macintosh, but most went back to Windows.
With Red Hat dropping consumer products, the version with brand reconition left the market place. Then there is the SCO deal, and SuSE being purchased by Novell. On top of that, there still isn't a clear desktop GUI choice. KDE may win out, or it might be Sun's Java Desktop, at this point who knows. Also there is the whole on the edge of 64-bit computer debate as well. However, very few of my clients could actually benefit from 64-bit power, hell a 2.4Ghz Pentium 4 chip will open Office and email just fine.
Datacenters and servers are a different story, Linux has a proven track record there, although on another note our last RH 7.3 box was replaced with FreeBSD this week.
I say 2006, because I suspect that by then, the Linux community will have some solid answers, the SCO thing will have been taken care of, and there should become some defacto standards entering the market.
Actually, it depends on volume. Some larger companies can purchase Windows, Office, et. al. for as little as USD 10 a copy. Granted they buy 100,000 copies at a time, but still.
I switched to Linux and then from Linux to Mac about 2 years ago because at the end of the day I wanted something that worked.
Linux's greatest strength is its flexablity and its greatest weakness, flexablity. I worked for a company once that looked at porting some it its tools to Linux. However, they looked at the costs of having to support different vendors. They did a test run of saying, "We'll only support Red Hat", and all the SuSE and other crowds bitched, then came the point of, "What GUI are we going to support?" We selected Gnome, all the KDE people wrote in and complained, and after three months the decision was made that Linux was not a viable option at this time. That was three years ago.
Until a clear defacto standard emerges, Linux is not going to be a viable option.
Now I say this as our last Linux box was retired from service this week and we are now running 100% BSD including Macintosh on Desktops. Sorry, but until tools like Adobe Photoshop, Macromedia et. al., and easy to use iLife apps are available for Linux, Macintosh is going to rule in several areas.
That said, I have had many clients swiching to Macintosh for their small offices. We go to meetings and someone is dealing with this weeks worm, and they ask us how we deal with the problem, and we reply, "We don't have too, we run Macs." And wait for their disgusted look or one of amazement. The amount of time and money we've saved using Macs over Windows and even Linux PC's have more than paid for their higher upfront costs.
DeBeers is a monopoly and create a market through advertising and controling supply. There are enough diamonds out there to take it a commodity, but the DeBeer cartel, like Opec, controls how many will be on the market.
I for one like the idea of factory diamonds just to drive down the price. I bought an engagement ring once and spent a pretty penny too, only to have the engagement broken off. Next time I hope that I don't have to spend as much.
Office 2004 or whatever they'll call it V.11, etc. will be out this summer for Macintosh.
My Question is how many people out there switched from Linux to Mac? I know I did about 2 years ago and every PERL/PHP developers confrence I attend, more people are attending with iBooks/PowerBooks.
IE only websites have always been bad business. I work as a tech. consultant and I have always explained it this way: Yes 95% of the market uses IE, however 5% doesn't and if they can't view your site, that's 5% of potenital sales/clients you are losing.
What a lot of people don't understand about Macintosh is that Apple is a Niche player. People in Video Production, arts, and many that just want something that is easy to use with support for programs like MS Office, Adobe et al., Mactomedia, scanners and printers, email, and internet, buy macs. I have told more people that just check email, write letters, and don't want to worry about it buy a Mac even though its more expensive up front. Some did, othere said, "yeah but Dell is half is much", however I hear more bitching about viruses and crashes, and devices not worked from those that bought a PC.
Linux still has the problem of not having name branded applications. We use a lot of printing and publishing applications and Linux just isn't an option. We need programs like InDesign and QuarkXpress. Now I have had clients use Linux and OpenOffice for employees that just need office applications. Saves time and money since they don't have time wasters like solitare and an internet browser.
Actually, I did release the first two generations of fixes..only made problems worse. Also, at the time, it was competitive market. The other part was I implemented a patented algorthim for hunting down cheating players developed by a good friend at the time. He allowed me to use the code, which was incorperated via an included library file so the code wasn't in the GPL'd sections of the scripts and encrypted.
It did fix the problems up until I ran out of time to run the system. It was generating a profit, just not enough justify me spending vast amounts of time running the game.
Actually, I have a palm branded hand held because the Clie's don't work with Macs. Plus Palm's machines are getting much more powerful to where they are trying to make their devices do everything under the sun.
Frankly, I don't use my palm much anymore. I, like many others, went back to a paper planner and pen. Especially for record keeping like milage logs and expense reports. I run a small company and once my palm crashed and it took a while to recover that information.
However, leaving this market will only allow someone else, maybe like Apple, to come into the market. Somehow I think this iPod tech licenses with HP has more than meets the eye. Could be be seeing some kind of iPaq produced for Apple?
We had a client and evaluated several different opensource options. MOst did about 80 - 90% of what they wanted and would have saved a lot of time and effort in development, however is was the problem:
The cleint's new web site involoved the buying and selling of goods and by using open source, there was the chance of someone having access to 90% of the code base and could find ways of exploiting the system. Because of this, they decided to code their own. That's not to say that there won't be exploits, but it also helps them keep a leg up on compeition.
To think this doesn't happen, I ran an online browser-based MMPOG that was opensource. People would download the source to figure out how to exploit the system. wasn't exactly fair, so I rewrote a lot of the code and never realeased it. That pissed off the GPL-Nazi crowd, even though nothing wrong with it because I was using the code for internal use and wasn't going to sell or distribute it. Personally its one reason why I switched now completely away from Linux to FreeBSD in protest now that affordable dedicated FreeBSD servers are out there.
We don't trust MS. In fact we only have 1 copy of windows 98SE that runs via Vitrual PC on our Macs. On the server end, we have a mixture of Linux, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD servers depending on our hosting needs. Although at the end of this week, our last servers running RH 7.3 are being replaced with FreeBSD.
We have had spammer attempting to send spam through relays, and flat out hacking attempts on some of our websites, Linux, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD are not 100% perfect, but we've yet to have anyone, to our knowdelge, hack the OpenBSD box.
We are a small business, but we know that running Mac's have saved us a lot in time and effort since we typically are not targeted by worms and viruses. And the Macs are pretty damn stable too. Sure we spent 30% more upfront, but I am willing to bet we've recovered that money by not having downtime due to problems with windows.
We have a cannon ZR10 from 4 years ago. It uses miniDV and has servd us well. Recently got a new battery for it and had to have the loader repaired after a drop/ I think the replacement model today is the ZR60 or 70;
Re:Simple stuff, but right on the money
on
What The Internet Isn't
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I find this article to be accurate from a technical standpoint, but I think that it falls far short on many areas. This is more of a technical arguement rather than one that tries to approach the Internet from a social or political aspect.
However, what the authors failed to either realize or mention is the dark side of net. Crackers, virus writers, SPAM kings, information pollution, etc. are all issues. Outside of the few webpages I still maintain for a few clients.
What the internet really is is an innovation. There were many flawed models in the dotcom era. I run an online classified site where local hockey players can go and place used equipment for sale for $1.50 per listing. Does it make me rich? Hell no, but it bring in enough to jusify the time and effort to maintain it.
I know many businesses that added a catalog or changed from a print catalog to an online store over the years and have grown quite large making millions per year. Its nothing more than mail order business that uses the internet to "print" their catalog instead of presses.
The other thing that I have to laugh is, "No one owns the Internet". Someone owns something somewhere. Econ: 101 there is no free lunch. Someone owns the DNS servers, someone owns the fiberoptics that the datapackets travels, someone owns the DSL/Cable/Dial in connection you use to get online. Granted, its impossible for any single enity to control the entire Internet.
And the "Free Market for innovation" thingy...I cannot agree entirely. What it has done is speed up the communication of ideas, which has led to many innovations, but still...someone has to pay the bandwidth bills some how. There is not zero barriers to entry here, but very low.
Now I agree, we are going to see increased regulations. The days of the geeks regulating the Internet is over. This is because of issues like SPAM and these quick spreading viruses. The chance for geekdom to develop its own solution is quickly closing. Either the solution will be made by industry, at which point different "standards" may emerge that breaks the internet into smaller sub-net (ie Yahoo! mail won't talk to AOL or MSN, etc.) or one will see more carnivore like devices installed at a hardware level to monitor activities. Will total censorship be an option? No, but I think the homesteading days of the internet are over.
Internet connectivity maybe come a commodity, but the connection without content is pretty lame. Now those with the conent are the ones providing a value added feature that they can charge for, such as subscription sites. Google indexes, stores, and brings massive amounts of data and those with the data are the ones with the edge. Why do you think their revenue as gone from almost nothing to something like a Billon dollars in the last 3 years? The control a means of accessing the information.
RIAA Vs. Napster - I sum this up easily. The RIAA got blind sided by a new method of content distribution. So they responded like many respond with an unknown or strange new thing: they attacked it. Most people I knew would have never pirated a song if the RIAA had attempted to work with Napster to develop a win-win senerio. Well, we have today, its called iTunes et al. I think that proves that people are willing to pay for songs if priced correctly.
And telecoms aren't going anywhere. We still have our analog phone lines into our business. I use a cell only and no home phone because I travel on business a lot. On a personal level, what happens when the power at your house goes out including taking the DSL/Cable modem with it and you have VoIP phone? This goes back to the 10 technologies that won't die.
Anyway, I will go through tomorrow and write a more detailed arguement from a social/geopolicital standpoint on why on a technical level, they are write, but a social/political level are probably off the mark a bit.
I used to run and develop a version of the Promisance Browser-Based game system. At its peak, had about 100 active players and found that only about 20% participated in the forums and larger community. From what I have read on the subject, only about 10% of people ingague in say active forum participation and those tend to be from the 5% that are the most addicted and the 5% that are trolls and hate everything you do.
The cost to implent wifi and broadband these days is pretty cheap. I worked for a short time a couple years ago that was attempting to place internet kiosks into hotels, however I kept saying that the company needed to find another market because WiFi was going o replace their pay per use and advertising model.
I got fired, formed my own consulting company and now our business is taking off and my old company is in Chapter 11.
But that's beyond the point. One of my favorite places o go is a locally owned coffee house. About 4 years ago they bought a couple used laptops and rented then out for $7 an hour. About 18 months ago, they started giving free WiFI, guess what, they've made a lot more money, because people like me use it to work away from work. I deal with customers from 10 AM - 5PM, then about 5:30 goto the coffee shop, grab a bite to eat, a bottomless cup and do my work until about 8PM, then go home. Guess what though, I am so regular as soon as I walk in, they tell the exact bill and everything's ready togo. We often meet clients there as well because of the asmostphere. $100 in gear and $80 a month for a commerical Cable connection is pretty cheap to bring in repeat customers. Hell, they proably almost recover the bill from me alone. When they switched to free mode, two new coffee houses were opening in the area. Guess what, they are still in business, one is out of business, and the third is still there, but doesn't do near the business as the local favorite.
Hotels are another story. I was at a meeting/seminar at a hotel and I was the first to test their WiFI connection. Its extremely handy and we quickly booked our next daylong seminar because of the easy access. Now others offer the same, but its a convience, and if they can improve bookings by 5 - 10%, it will more than pay for the service.
My last story is that of our favorite all night diner. Its not uncommon for us to work until 1 or 2 AM. Usually take an hour off for news and Leno's monologue then go out for coffee and a late night snack. Well, we noticed that they too put in free WiFI access. We sometimes have working lunches there as well, although its not widely used as say the coffee house.
We ran a small business from a friends home when we first got started. Since this was a residence, we got a PO box at a mail boxes etc, now UPS store, where we could have packages and mail delivered. It was really handy for us as we were often on the move and on the go. Its not false info, and its not giving out our real addresses either.
We run a number of OpenBSD servers. We do some hosting for political sites and due to the nature of some script kiddies out there, better safer than sorry.
We are still running everything on ipv6. Now we have had a couple sites that we've had to move to FreeBSD servers due to the lack of SMP support in OpenBSD and needed the extra power. However, overall, I've had good luck with OpenBSD. Its the lack of support for SMP and other features that keep me from an extremely large scale deployment...
I used Courier to add that extra dead space on those 20 page papers that were really about 18 pages long, and I always used the excuse, "Well, its good enough for the government, its good enough for you!".
Now why did I go and enroll for a Masters program next fall again?
who made major software for their platform away by building competing products (Adobe and FCP), force all of us to use their hardware, ect...
I know your playing devil's advocate, but ever use the last version of Premeire (6 if I remember) on Mac or PC? It was a piece of junk. The company I was working at the time was loosing money out the wazoo on project overruns due to the program crashing under windows. So they spend a bunch of money to buy Macs and Final Cut Pro and the next quarters, the bleeding due to over runs had stopped. Jobs were being completed on time and even ahead of schedule because we didn't get halfway through a 4 hour render and have the system or program crash.
Actually, to store and carry files was one of the design specs for the iPod. Plus I do believe the time frame was about 2 - 3 years ago when other portable drivers were larger and slower, and DVD burners were slow and expensive. And as the guy said, the iPod is a smal form factor.
Actually, the laptop needed to be a G4 the reason being Final Cut Pro. FCP needs a G4 in order to achieve real time rendering of some features. Although I do believe they used AVID to edit the films, but incase he wanted to make a change or something, the G4 would be handy.
I know a couple indy nature filmers that do most of their editing work on the road on G4 laptops. Go out shoot in the day, come back, plug in the DV camera and start editing in FCP.
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Furthermore, the current equipment with their upgrades are still equal too, if not superior to anything they might face in combat today. I think the EU are the only ones funding more advanced aircraft at the moment.
Lastly, the status of War-Fare has changed. The chances of us facing a well armed, trained air-force in air to air combat is almost nil. Opening hours of Gulf War I proved that its pretty well futile to do so. At most, the FA-22 was a stop gap measure and technology demostrator. Replace the airframes that are exiting due to fatigue and use it to demo new technology while the next geneartion of RPV's, UAV or what the next acrynom will be.
The V-22 was killed by the first Bush administration and reintroduced by Clinton. It's been a disaster since day one and most out siders agree serves no real purpose. But the question is, how much of the technology will find its way onto other projects? Expensive, yes, but most research is.
I also question how many Joint Strike Fighters will enter service as well. It is clear that remote vechciles are the next generation of weapons, but we need to do something to phase out/replace airframes while they are developed.
Google really helped with research papers couple years ago, but now I find there's too much spam. So much so, that now I'm into Grad studies, I am going to Lexis-Nexis to find out information about topics. Also I have found that the Internet is certianly not what it used to be either in terms of quality of content. There used to be a lot more academic sites appear when I searching for information on a topic. Now, especially being in an political science related field, International Affairs, doing a web search on some topics leads to dozens of ranting bloggers instead of more academic type work.
I grew up around the defense aircraft industry. My father is a retired executive from McDonnell Douglas (now Boeing), and let me tell you, the defense subsidy alalogy is pretty well false when it comes to the development of Civilian aircraft.
We are 100% Macintosh on the desktop because I can then spend time on billable hour projects, not internal stuff. But generally speaking, I really just like how BSD, especially the ports system, is organized and managed. Linux has always been scattered brained with more distros that you can count, where as I like the core development teams in both Free & Open BSD.
When I used to run an online browser-based game system, we often had more people trying to beat the system than the game. Led to problems under Linux and since it was a hobby site that I maintianed on my spare time, I didn't have time to mess with keeping everything 100% uptodate. So I reset up the game on an OpenBSD platform. Sure it didn't scale as well, but had no sucessful breaches from the script kiddies.
Now that I work as a consultant with small and medium sized companies in this area, security has become a staple of my business. Most of my work is in Policy advising because we still see a lot of network breachs, a vast majority, having some kind of internal proceedure issue. Aka, someone calls saying they are from branch y and forgot a password and someone gives it to them or a disgruntled employee sells information to a competitor. Or worse yet, employee fired/let go and no one removes accesss to the system until after they're gone if at all. I have seen some companies that still have user accounts for people that haven't worked there in over 3 years.
Still these are mainly small businesses with less than 10 people that are in real estate or some service business where they might have a website, POS, Email, MS Office, and Quickbooks more than larger companies that have an actual IT guy or department (even then...I am amazed at the total lack of intelligence of some of the people with MSCE at the end of their business cards)
Still, the biggest threats are comming not on the server side, but client side with viruses and trojans galore. Its the average joe blow that opens every attachment they are sent that causes the bulk of problems from my perpective.
SG-1 is one of my favorite shows these days. That and the Simpsons are about the only shows I watch other than the News and Jay Leno. I've missed about 3 seasons while I was in college, but making it up when I catch a show in sydication now and then. One thing that made SG-1 cool was it was actually orginial. Sure, same old sci-fi themes, but the casting was a good mix and the writing has generally been fair as well. Richard Dean Anderson's character was a complete departure from the movie, but his character is pretty funny.
Too late for karma, but actually we've had a missle designed to destroy satilites in orbit for quite a while its called peguses, launched from an F-15 at about 60k feet if I remember correctly.
We were providing a service others needed at the time. Looking back with hindsight, I don't know how long it could have been sustainable, but it didn't really matter because a larger ISP in the city offered over USD 1M in stock and cash for the company. I took about $40,000 in cold hard cash and nothing in stock used it to pay off student loans and finish my last two years of college (I did this as a "summer internship"). Okay, I bought a new computer along with new Hockey pads, but There was no way our company was worth that amount of money. $250,000, yeah, that would have been a fair estimate. I think our first year revenue projection was about $200,000, but that's irrelevant. The other two took hundreds of thousands in stock that is worthless today because I think the company that bought us out went under in 2001.
However there is still money to be made on the interent. I now own/run a small company that owns a couple sites that still generate enough for me to pay the bills while in Grad School, so I consider it my part time job. My $850 a month stipen covers my rent, utlities, and food. But still, there was a need in the local community for this type of website so I started one. Spent some money on Google Ad Words and $50 on monthly adverts in a newsletter, and things are going well.
I also work as a consultant for others creating websites. Only get 1 or 2 jobs a year, but the average $1000 pays for a semester of classes almost...
With Red Hat dropping consumer products, the version with brand reconition left the market place. Then there is the SCO deal, and SuSE being purchased by Novell. On top of that, there still isn't a clear desktop GUI choice. KDE may win out, or it might be Sun's Java Desktop, at this point who knows. Also there is the whole on the edge of 64-bit computer debate as well. However, very few of my clients could actually benefit from 64-bit power, hell a 2.4Ghz Pentium 4 chip will open Office and email just fine.
Datacenters and servers are a different story, Linux has a proven track record there, although on another note our last RH 7.3 box was replaced with FreeBSD this week.
I say 2006, because I suspect that by then, the Linux community will have some solid answers, the SCO thing will have been taken care of, and there should become some defacto standards entering the market.
I switched to Linux and then from Linux to Mac about 2 years ago because at the end of the day I wanted something that worked.
Linux's greatest strength is its flexablity and its greatest weakness, flexablity. I worked for a company once that looked at porting some it its tools to Linux. However, they looked at the costs of having to support different vendors. They did a test run of saying, "We'll only support Red Hat", and all the SuSE and other crowds bitched, then came the point of, "What GUI are we going to support?" We selected Gnome, all the KDE people wrote in and complained, and after three months the decision was made that Linux was not a viable option at this time. That was three years ago.
Until a clear defacto standard emerges, Linux is not going to be a viable option.
Now I say this as our last Linux box was retired from service this week and we are now running 100% BSD including Macintosh on Desktops. Sorry, but until tools like Adobe Photoshop, Macromedia et. al., and easy to use iLife apps are available for Linux, Macintosh is going to rule in several areas.
That said, I have had many clients swiching to Macintosh for their small offices. We go to meetings and someone is dealing with this weeks worm, and they ask us how we deal with the problem, and we reply, "We don't have too, we run Macs." And wait for their disgusted look or one of amazement. The amount of time and money we've saved using Macs over Windows and even Linux PC's have more than paid for their higher upfront costs.
I for one like the idea of factory diamonds just to drive down the price. I bought an engagement ring once and spent a pretty penny too, only to have the engagement broken off. Next time I hope that I don't have to spend as much.
My Question is how many people out there switched from Linux to Mac? I know I did about 2 years ago and every PERL/PHP developers confrence I attend, more people are attending with iBooks/PowerBooks.
IE only websites have always been bad business. I work as a tech. consultant and I have always explained it this way: Yes 95% of the market uses IE, however 5% doesn't and if they can't view your site, that's 5% of potenital sales/clients you are losing.
What a lot of people don't understand about Macintosh is that Apple is a Niche player. People in Video Production, arts, and many that just want something that is easy to use with support for programs like MS Office, Adobe et al., Mactomedia, scanners and printers, email, and internet, buy macs. I have told more people that just check email, write letters, and don't want to worry about it buy a Mac even though its more expensive up front. Some did, othere said, "yeah but Dell is half is much", however I hear more bitching about viruses and crashes, and devices not worked from those that bought a PC.
Linux still has the problem of not having name branded applications. We use a lot of printing and publishing applications and Linux just isn't an option. We need programs like InDesign and QuarkXpress. Now I have had clients use Linux and OpenOffice for employees that just need office applications. Saves time and money since they don't have time wasters like solitare and an internet browser.
It did fix the problems up until I ran out of time to run the system. It was generating a profit, just not enough justify me spending vast amounts of time running the game.
Frankly, I don't use my palm much anymore. I, like many others, went back to a paper planner and pen. Especially for record keeping like milage logs and expense reports. I run a small company and once my palm crashed and it took a while to recover that information.
However, leaving this market will only allow someone else, maybe like Apple, to come into the market. Somehow I think this iPod tech licenses with HP has more than meets the eye. Could be be seeing some kind of iPaq produced for Apple?
The cleint's new web site involoved the buying and selling of goods and by using open source, there was the chance of someone having access to 90% of the code base and could find ways of exploiting the system. Because of this, they decided to code their own. That's not to say that there won't be exploits, but it also helps them keep a leg up on compeition.
To think this doesn't happen, I ran an online browser-based MMPOG that was opensource. People would download the source to figure out how to exploit the system. wasn't exactly fair, so I rewrote a lot of the code and never realeased it. That pissed off the GPL-Nazi crowd, even though nothing wrong with it because I was using the code for internal use and wasn't going to sell or distribute it. Personally its one reason why I switched now completely away from Linux to FreeBSD in protest now that affordable dedicated FreeBSD servers are out there.
Funny, all the computers spell checkers I saw in germany were always set to English (US)
We have had spammer attempting to send spam through relays, and flat out hacking attempts on some of our websites, Linux, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD are not 100% perfect, but we've yet to have anyone, to our knowdelge, hack the OpenBSD box.
We are a small business, but we know that running Mac's have saved us a lot in time and effort since we typically are not targeted by worms and viruses. And the Macs are pretty damn stable too. Sure we spent 30% more upfront, but I am willing to bet we've recovered that money by not having downtime due to problems with windows.
We have a cannon ZR10 from 4 years ago. It uses miniDV and has servd us well. Recently got a new battery for it and had to have the loader repaired after a drop/ I think the replacement model today is the ZR60 or 70;
However, what the authors failed to either realize or mention is the dark side of net. Crackers, virus writers, SPAM kings, information pollution, etc. are all issues. Outside of the few webpages I still maintain for a few clients.
What the internet really is is an innovation. There were many flawed models in the dotcom era. I run an online classified site where local hockey players can go and place used equipment for sale for $1.50 per listing. Does it make me rich? Hell no, but it bring in enough to jusify the time and effort to maintain it.
I know many businesses that added a catalog or changed from a print catalog to an online store over the years and have grown quite large making millions per year. Its nothing more than mail order business that uses the internet to "print" their catalog instead of presses.
The other thing that I have to laugh is, "No one owns the Internet". Someone owns something somewhere. Econ: 101 there is no free lunch. Someone owns the DNS servers, someone owns the fiberoptics that the datapackets travels, someone owns the DSL/Cable/Dial in connection you use to get online. Granted, its impossible for any single enity to control the entire Internet.
And the "Free Market for innovation" thingy...I cannot agree entirely. What it has done is speed up the communication of ideas, which has led to many innovations, but still...someone has to pay the bandwidth bills some how. There is not zero barriers to entry here, but very low.
Now I agree, we are going to see increased regulations. The days of the geeks regulating the Internet is over. This is because of issues like SPAM and these quick spreading viruses. The chance for geekdom to develop its own solution is quickly closing. Either the solution will be made by industry, at which point different "standards" may emerge that breaks the internet into smaller sub-net (ie Yahoo! mail won't talk to AOL or MSN, etc.) or one will see more carnivore like devices installed at a hardware level to monitor activities. Will total censorship be an option? No, but I think the homesteading days of the internet are over.
Internet connectivity maybe come a commodity, but the connection without content is pretty lame. Now those with the conent are the ones providing a value added feature that they can charge for, such as subscription sites. Google indexes, stores, and brings massive amounts of data and those with the data are the ones with the edge. Why do you think their revenue as gone from almost nothing to something like a Billon dollars in the last 3 years? The control a means of accessing the information.
RIAA Vs. Napster - I sum this up easily. The RIAA got blind sided by a new method of content distribution. So they responded like many respond with an unknown or strange new thing: they attacked it. Most people I knew would have never pirated a song if the RIAA had attempted to work with Napster to develop a win-win senerio. Well, we have today, its called iTunes et al. I think that proves that people are willing to pay for songs if priced correctly.
And telecoms aren't going anywhere. We still have our analog phone lines into our business. I use a cell only and no home phone because I travel on business a lot. On a personal level, what happens when the power at your house goes out including taking the DSL/Cable modem with it and you have VoIP phone? This goes back to the 10 technologies that won't die.
Anyway, I will go through tomorrow and write a more detailed arguement from a social/geopolicital standpoint on why on a technical level, they are write, but a social/political level are probably off the mark a bit.
I used to run and develop a version of the Promisance Browser-Based game system. At its peak, had about 100 active players and found that only about 20% participated in the forums and larger community. From what I have read on the subject, only about 10% of people ingague in say active forum participation and those tend to be from the 5% that are the most addicted and the 5% that are trolls and hate everything you do.
I got fired, formed my own consulting company and now our business is taking off and my old company is in Chapter 11.
But that's beyond the point. One of my favorite places o go is a locally owned coffee house. About 4 years ago they bought a couple used laptops and rented then out for $7 an hour. About 18 months ago, they started giving free WiFI, guess what, they've made a lot more money, because people like me use it to work away from work. I deal with customers from 10 AM - 5PM, then about 5:30 goto the coffee shop, grab a bite to eat, a bottomless cup and do my work until about 8PM, then go home. Guess what though, I am so regular as soon as I walk in, they tell the exact bill and everything's ready togo. We often meet clients there as well because of the asmostphere. $100 in gear and $80 a month for a commerical Cable connection is pretty cheap to bring in repeat customers. Hell, they proably almost recover the bill from me alone. When they switched to free mode, two new coffee houses were opening in the area. Guess what, they are still in business, one is out of business, and the third is still there, but doesn't do near the business as the local favorite.
Hotels are another story. I was at a meeting/seminar at a hotel and I was the first to test their WiFI connection. Its extremely handy and we quickly booked our next daylong seminar because of the easy access. Now others offer the same, but its a convience, and if they can improve bookings by 5 - 10%, it will more than pay for the service.
My last story is that of our favorite all night diner. Its not uncommon for us to work until 1 or 2 AM. Usually take an hour off for news and Leno's monologue then go out for coffee and a late night snack. Well, we noticed that they too put in free WiFI access. We sometimes have working lunches there as well, although its not widely used as say the coffee house.
We ran a small business from a friends home when we first got started. Since this was a residence, we got a PO box at a mail boxes etc, now UPS store, where we could have packages and mail delivered. It was really handy for us as we were often on the move and on the go. Its not false info, and its not giving out our real addresses either.
We are still running everything on ipv6. Now we have had a couple sites that we've had to move to FreeBSD servers due to the lack of SMP support in OpenBSD and needed the extra power. However, overall, I've had good luck with OpenBSD. Its the lack of support for SMP and other features that keep me from an extremely large scale deployment...
Now why did I go and enroll for a Masters program next fall again?
I know your playing devil's advocate, but ever use the last version of Premeire (6 if I remember) on Mac or PC? It was a piece of junk. The company I was working at the time was loosing money out the wazoo on project overruns due to the program crashing under windows. So they spend a bunch of money to buy Macs and Final Cut Pro and the next quarters, the bleeding due to over runs had stopped. Jobs were being completed on time and even ahead of schedule because we didn't get halfway through a 4 hour render and have the system or program crash.
Actually, the laptop needed to be a G4 the reason being Final Cut Pro. FCP needs a G4 in order to achieve real time rendering of some features. Although I do believe they used AVID to edit the films, but incase he wanted to make a change or something, the G4 would be handy.
I know a couple indy nature filmers that do most of their editing work on the road on G4 laptops. Go out shoot in the day, come back, plug in the DV camera and start editing in FCP.