Ironically the idea of splitting Microsoft up into smaller divisions would probably have been in their best interests and in the interests of the industry.
That way the OS division would price their product to cover their costs and to make themselves a modest profit.
The monolithic structure of Microsoft just encourages them to try and grow their entire market presence by overpricing their main products to fund in-roads into other markets. A position that puts the customer at a disadvantage.
Yeah, I can see how making them non-transferable would be a good idea.
However patenting things that cannot currently be produced or patenting things that you have discovered (such as parts of the human genome) just holds technology back.
The parasite business model. Companies that buy or create patents then just sue everyone. We've seen SCO and Unisys (LZW patent), this sort of action seems to suggest a failing in their product line.
I have no problem with companies protecting their innovative ideas to ensure their time and money invested is rewarded.
I believe that you should only be able to defend patents and your inventions if you actually produce a product based upon them.
There's a proper reason for having a steering wheel in a car and that is accuracy and usability. You have to turn the wheel quite a large distance to go from full lock left to full lock right. With a joystick it would be a foot at the most.
Other reasons include feedback, you simply wouldn't get the right feedback from a joystick. A stick is ideal for a plane as you are banking the plane towards the left and to the right, in a car you are rotating the wheel and so a rotating control method works best.
Also, to use a stick you would need control systems, fully powered hydraulic steering, this would be prone to faults and in the event of a system failure you would lose steering. Currently cars have power assisted steering but standard steering still functions in the event of a fluid leak etc.
Other problems with a stick system? how about requiring the engine to be running for the system to work? this would make getting your car onto a recovery truck rather difficult if the engine won't run. What about getting towed? impossible without the engine running.
So while it might be possible to change cars to use a joystick it is simply a bad idea.
Well their catch-22 situation is that if they fund their in-roads into other markets using vast margins on Windows and Office but then they are forced to discount those product lines, then it will result in less funds being available.
Of course they do have a vast war chest, but how much of that they would like to spend, who knows. They're just too successful and their only options is to grow wider not taller.
While no company would like to have to do it, Microsoft really need a back-up plan and need a strategy of how to deal with a vastly shrinking market share in OSes and office software.
They simply can't grow their PC based business any longer and users are less likely to want to cough up hundreds of dollars for Office and Windows.
Their problem is they've been so focussed on boring office applications for so long that they're not exactly that good at other market areas. Buying other companies is the quickest way to gain expertise but when you look at the purchases they have made, they have hardly captitalised on their gains.
It's not always that simple, certain companies often headhunt employees at rival firms. Employees don't always find another job on their own initiative.
Intel has headhunted a lot of Motorola staff in the past, must to the annoyance of Motorola who felt that many of their secrets would be stolen.
The difference is, I'm not the one hacking the system. Therefore the person who has hacked the system should be a bit more responsible in putting out the information.
Anyway, the said car parking charges are extortionate. Typically £5-7 and I'm only there around three hours. I doubt I would "hack" it anyway, would mean leaving a laptop in the car for starters.
Talk to people in your office (especially if you're in IT), you'll soon find out how widespread Linux use is.
I run Gentoo at home, I've given Suse 9.1 CDs (personal edition) to two employees at work. So even in a tech savvy work place you're only looking at a handful of people running Linux. But given time the word will spread, might be a while before it becomes 50:50 and all the heated discussions start though.
There are bound be countries where Linux has a greater market share, simply down to price and Microsoft's crackdown on piracy.
Indeed, it all goes to show why Windows embedded doesn't find its way into mass produced hardware. The requirements are too vast and result in uncompetitive products.
They're not hyping it since their pal Microsoft has delayed 64-bit Windows. Intel probably doesn't want to put pressure on Microsoft since Microsoft might favour AMD more.
Intel have already lost out on providing XBox2 with a CPU.
A damn good point, the only way I can see them powering such devices wirelessly is if they use a coil and place it in a magnetic field. Of course such a strong magnetic field will play havoc with anything close by so the PC cases will need good magnetic shielding.
So there you have it, this is a tech which we aren't going to see for 10-20 years. Sun desperately needs some good ideas now, they won't be around in 10-20 years if they don't sort out their near future.
Patents should really be used IMHO to protect a designer, inventor or R&D department from having their revolutionary ideas stolen by other companies. Having their product cloned and sold cheaper basically because the other company doesn't have the research costs.
But what about coincidences? if two inventors come up with the same idea and one manages to get the patent before the other?
What about prior art, it's not hard to imagine a situation at the moment where a company could look at an idea in the Linux kernel, patent it and then use that patent against Linux.
Well they were writing the laws earlier in the year, they have plenty of people warning them that these sort of problems would occur but they didn't take notice.
They have to provide value for money for EU citizens and this unfortunately puts them at odds with the nice businessmen who give them nice envelopes of cash (EU commissioners are unelected and don't exactly have a reputation for honesty).
Scientists have created something that kills mice when injected into them. There's already thousands of things that can do that.
If you want to eliminate CJD, BSE etc... you need to improve the conditions that animals are raised in. Allowing them to be raised in poor conditions and then expecting the scientists to cure them when they get ill is stupid. Not to mention all the animals that will have to die and suffer just to cure animals for cheap food.
Besides, both Linux and Windows get plenty of hack attempts and plenty of holes are closed. So neither is probably that ideal for military use.
Nothing will ever be that secure, they should take steps to make sure their systems aren't exposed to the public, private networks, no dialup numbers, no use of wifi etc..
Linux is more robust and reliable than Windows typically.
Yes it can be a pain getting it setup and configured, but once it is then it just works. Things don't seem to break quite to often and you don't get some spyware junk taking over your browser.
All Linux distributions really need is damn good installation and configuration tools.
Depends if the vendor believes that multicore chips provide the same level of power as the equivalent individual chips. If they do or in fact it is even faster than individual chips then I can see them charging per core.
Slashdot Mirror
Ironically the idea of splitting Microsoft up into smaller divisions would probably have been in their best interests and in the interests of the industry.
That way the OS division would price their product to cover their costs and to make themselves a modest profit.
The monolithic structure of Microsoft just encourages them to try and grow their entire market presence by overpricing their main products to fund in-roads into other markets. A position that puts the customer at a disadvantage.
Yeah, I can see how making them non-transferable would be a good idea.
However patenting things that cannot currently be produced or patenting things that you have discovered (such as parts of the human genome) just holds technology back.
The parasite business model. Companies that buy or create patents then just sue everyone. We've seen SCO and Unisys (LZW patent), this sort of action seems to suggest a failing in their product line.
I have no problem with companies protecting their innovative ideas to ensure their time and money invested is rewarded.
I believe that you should only be able to defend patents and your inventions if you actually produce a product based upon them.
There's a proper reason for having a steering wheel in a car and that is accuracy and usability. You have to turn the wheel quite a large distance to go from full lock left to full lock right. With a joystick it would be a foot at the most.
Other reasons include feedback, you simply wouldn't get the right feedback from a joystick. A stick is ideal for a plane as you are banking the plane towards the left and to the right, in a car you are rotating the wheel and so a rotating control method works best.
Also, to use a stick you would need control systems, fully powered hydraulic steering, this would be prone to faults and in the event of a system failure you would lose steering. Currently cars have power assisted steering but standard steering still functions in the event of a fluid leak etc.
Other problems with a stick system? how about requiring the engine to be running for the system to work? this would make getting your car onto a recovery truck rather difficult if the engine won't run. What about getting towed? impossible without the engine running.
So while it might be possible to change cars to use a joystick it is simply a bad idea.
Well their catch-22 situation is that if they fund their in-roads into other markets using vast margins on Windows and Office but then they are forced to discount those product lines, then it will result in less funds being available.
Of course they do have a vast war chest, but how much of that they would like to spend, who knows. They're just too successful and their only options is to grow wider not taller.
While no company would like to have to do it, Microsoft really need a back-up plan and need a strategy of how to deal with a vastly shrinking market share in OSes and office software.
They simply can't grow their PC based business any longer and users are less likely to want to cough up hundreds of dollars for Office and Windows.
Their problem is they've been so focussed on boring office applications for so long that they're not exactly that good at other market areas. Buying other companies is the quickest way to gain expertise but when you look at the purchases they have made, they have hardly captitalised on their gains.
Run an enterprise Linux distro such as Red Hat or something from IBM and it's no worse a situation as other systems (including Windows).
Look at the WinXP SP2 fiasco, Microsoft creates many issues with their bug fixes. In fact they upgrade your bugs.
It's not always that simple, certain companies often headhunt employees at rival firms. Employees don't always find another job on their own initiative.
Intel has headhunted a lot of Motorola staff in the past, must to the annoyance of Motorola who felt that many of their secrets would be stolen.
The difference is, I'm not the one hacking the system. Therefore the person who has hacked the system should be a bit more responsible in putting out the information.
Anyway, the said car parking charges are extortionate. Typically £5-7 and I'm only there around three hours. I doubt I would "hack" it anyway, would mean leaving a laptop in the car for starters.
I can imagine some card company out there will try and put a stop to this, purely to save their own skins for putting out fairly weak systems.
:)
Could be a useful tool though, I'd love to save car parking charges (place where I park sometimes uses magnetic cards)
Talk to people in your office (especially if you're in IT), you'll soon find out how widespread Linux use is.
I run Gentoo at home, I've given Suse 9.1 CDs (personal edition) to two employees at work. So even in a tech savvy work place you're only looking at a handful of people running Linux. But given time the word will spread, might be a while before it becomes 50:50 and all the heated discussions start though.
There are bound be countries where Linux has a greater market share, simply down to price and Microsoft's crackdown on piracy.
Indeed, it all goes to show why Windows embedded doesn't find its way into mass produced hardware. The requirements are too vast and result in uncompetitive products.
They're not hyping it since their pal Microsoft has delayed 64-bit Windows. Intel probably doesn't want to put pressure on Microsoft since Microsoft might favour AMD more.
Intel have already lost out on providing XBox2 with a CPU.
A damn good point, the only way I can see them powering such devices wirelessly is if they use a coil and place it in a magnetic field. Of course such a strong magnetic field will play havoc with anything close by so the PC cases will need good magnetic shielding.
So there you have it, this is a tech which we aren't going to see for 10-20 years. Sun desperately needs some good ideas now, they won't be around in 10-20 years if they don't sort out their near future.
Patents should really be used IMHO to protect a designer, inventor or R&D department from having their revolutionary ideas stolen by other companies. Having their product cloned and sold cheaper basically because the other company doesn't have the research costs.
But what about coincidences? if two inventors come up with the same idea and one manages to get the patent before the other?
What about prior art, it's not hard to imagine a situation at the moment where a company could look at an idea in the Linux kernel, patent it and then use that patent against Linux.
Maybe you have forgotten about the 20 commissioners who resigned?
s tm
Who's to say any of the current commission are any better? (unless changes have been made to make this impossible).
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/297457.
Well they were writing the laws earlier in the year, they have plenty of people warning them that these sort of problems would occur but they didn't take notice.
They have to provide value for money for EU citizens and this unfortunately puts them at odds with the nice businessmen who give them nice envelopes of cash (EU commissioners are unelected and don't exactly have a reputation for honesty).
Don't eat cows, job done.
Scientists have created something that kills mice when injected into them. There's already thousands of things that can do that.
If you want to eliminate CJD, BSE etc... you need to improve the conditions that animals are raised in. Allowing them to be raised in poor conditions and then expecting the scientists to cure them when they get ill is stupid. Not to mention all the animals that will have to die and suffer just to cure animals for cheap food.
Why can't you simply go to Window Update and have that check the health of your system, rectifying any problems?
Exactly!
Besides, both Linux and Windows get plenty of hack attempts and plenty of holes are closed. So neither is probably that ideal for military use.
Nothing will ever be that secure, they should take steps to make sure their systems aren't exposed to the public, private networks, no dialup numbers, no use of wifi etc..
Linux is more robust and reliable than Windows typically.
Yes it can be a pain getting it setup and configured, but once it is then it just works. Things don't seem to break quite to often and you don't get some spyware junk taking over your browser.
All Linux distributions really need is damn good installation and configuration tools.
It's their way of getting people to log off and watch more TV?
Depends if the vendor believes that multicore chips provide the same level of power as the equivalent individual chips. If they do or in fact it is even faster than individual chips then I can see them charging per core.
Windows Mobile is easy enough to mess up without viruses. It implements the registry like on desktop Windows, only it's harder to backup.
Quite a few people on the E800 forum I read have had problems where their Bluetooth stops working.