I disagree, Microsoft didn't get to where they are using patents, it's their dirty business practices that given them their edge. Yeah, I'd like to see business process, method, and broad moronic patents banned, but that won't help in taking Microsoft to task anytime soon. If they REALLY want to hurt MS, simply ban their products in Europe. What a monster blow that would be, a minimum $6B dollar hit to annual revenue, but likely even higher since many US corps outfit their EU offices from US sourced software. I think an immediate 25% drop in total MS revenues wouldn't be unrealistic.. however... given the incredible collateral pain that would cause for EU businesses, I can't in any way shape or form see anything even remotely close to that happening.
For once, you can't blame Microsoft for ruining an industry, and I can't say I'll feel sad if McAfee or Symantec dies...
I prefer to think of it as if you get into a cage with an 800 pound (and growing) gorilla and a fully grown banana tree, plant your own banana tree, and eat only bananas off your tree, *eventually* that gorilla is going hit 900 punds and decide it's time to rip you into quivering shreds so it can eat your bananas too. It's the price you pay... and I won't shed a single tear either, I'll just add McAfee and Symantec to Corel, Lotus, Netscape and all the other MS roadkill.
The thing to me that most sucks was that Stallman and the BSD folks basically made a bet on human nature.
The optomists are losing badly.
Sad but true, that's why my preferred license is the LGPL, it's a decent combination of both worlds. You want to incorporate my work unmodified? Fine, nobody loses, the source is still "out there". You want to modify my code and redistribute it? Well, either release those changes or pay me to relicense my code. BSD and GPL are both extremes. With BSD, expect the worst, people will use your work and flip you the bird. With the GPL, expect the worst, people will shun your code if they're forced to open code they want to keep closed. Don't get me wrong, BSD and GPL are both morally superior to the LGPL, but based on human nature, the LGPL offers a good compromise between encouraging use and forcing retribution.
I run up against this shit ALL the time. The best way to win these is to show SAVINGS, not COST. It also helps if you can say that company A, B, and C all use this solution too. However, this is not fool proof, some project mgrs hard link Oracle with DBs, MS with PCs, Sun with servers, and nothing you can say will break them out of that mindset. It's the old, you don't want to be the highest or lowest bidder on a project.
I was just going to suggest that the parent has deved a website used by more than 2 people. You've put it much more eliquently, I especially like the build a dog house vs. build a skyscraper comparison. I'd add, that Java is far more widely known. I can walk away from my code and KNOW somebody will be able to pick up where I left off, customers tend to like that kind of thing.
Unless things have changed very recently, there has never been a cure for any viral infection. Bacterial infections we have a pretty good handle on, but viral infections are particularly nasty because they do their dirty work safely hidden inside cells. We have treatments (see article), and vaccinations, that may allow the immune system to gain the upper hand on a virus, but nothing we have (right now) can effectively target and kill a virus in vivo (the body). This is a pretty broad generalization, but most of the BS posted about potential cures for viral infections are in vitero (test tube) results that wind up being lethal when animal testing begins. Until there's a breakthrough in viral drug targetting, the best we'll be able to do is treat. FWIW, IANAV (I am not a virologist) but I have friends and family that work in the medical profession so I do keep on top of this stuff especially with all the nasty crap floating around these days..
From that one line I deduce that you've never worked at Oracle. There are still some talented people there, but much of the top talent has long since jumped ship.
You're lumping "customizing" and "maintaining" into the same bucket. I often tweak code, we run a lot of tweaked applications at work. However, we don't "maintain" the whole OS/application stack ourselves. Running a diff of a few hundred lines of "customized" code against 3 apps and a few network components is VERY different from "maintaining" the entire OS/application suite. The "maintain" part is the same for Windows and Linux zealots, you run an update against a support server. The code "tweak" part is only possible under Linux/OSS, Windows users *generally* have to live with what they're given, barring a few OSS apps like Apache.
That should be what standard of living does $15K afford you in Hyderbad, India vs. $75K in Seattle, WA? I think the answer is quite a bit lower. Rents in that area of India appear to be quite high compared to the rest of the country. That said, it seems to be a heck of a lot nicer than the rest of the country too! My guess-ti-math is in the 50% lower COL range, about like making $40K in Seattle. Still not terrible for right out of school.
BTW, I'm not ragging on you, just the whole "sell 'em to the 3rd world" movement. The problem is that the per capita income in Sudan is $460 per year, as compared to $40,100 per year in the US. $150 is an impulse level 0.3% of income over here but a whopping 10.9% of income there. To equate the economic impact, that's like selling them for a bargain $4,370.90 here. To make matters worse, Sudanese are a bit more preoccupied with buying food and shelter with that $460 than we are here. You need to visit one of these 3rd world countries to really understand that they have far more pressing issues than getting a wireless tablet. I've never been to Africa, but I've been to Honduras and Haiti and let me tell you, at $2,900 and $1,600 per capita income, the shanty towns in those countries would be Beverly Hills to most Africans. Besides, you need electricity to recharge these things, there is virtually no power grid in most of these poor countries.
Thats not going to happen, at least not in any kinda of short time frame. However, you've got a point, going only DirectX is a dead end. Fact is, DirectX is only Windows and XBox, that means you need to recode to OpenGL for Mac, Linux, PS, Nintendo, etc etc. Moreover, Windows supports OpenGL (XBox can rot in hell). So OpenGL gives you the largest potential customer base of the two. That said, DX offers a very large helper library for sound, input devs, etc. OpenGL's GameGLUT (see GLUT 3.7) takes a step towards creating a proper game helper lib but only time will tell if it will be adopted and expanded.
Since acquiring Suse, they've seen its share of the Linux market shrink compared to Red Hat's.
You have data to back that up? Everything I've seen in the mid to large corp field defies that, with a few SuSE rollouts I know of, at least in Europe and North America, and no new RH rollouts. The reason seems to be that the Novell brand is an easier sale for IT project managers, it's always Novell SuSE, never SuSE alone, and possibly cheaper support contracts? Don't get me wrong, RH still has more boxes out there, but I'm not getting wind of new RH deployments versus SuSE.
This would only be possible in a VERY small company rollout and with absolutely no customizations, no legacy data, or legacy workflows. I guarantee you, and yes, I've done several Oracle Apps rollouts, that a company with 1000+ employees has no hope in hell of rolling out a system in anything under 6 months. The average being well over a year. The longest part of these rollouts are getting people to sign off on workflows, the tech piece is a relatively small part of it.
Ditto... Solaris admin turned Linux admin. Still have a few Solaris boxes kicking around but their days are numbered. I have a few Apache servers going but no MySQL or PHP, here it's Oracle and Java. About 90% of Solaris skills transpose directly to Linux.
I love this communistic bullshit line. How in the fcuk do you equate open source software that is free as in speech, not free as in beer, as being communistic? Tell me, which current system of government is (was) defined by free speech and transparency?
Besides, they make us TURN OFF all our electronics during take off and prior to landing. The only time it *should* be an issue is at cruising altitude. Since we've been using our electronics like this for a hell of a long time, I doubt it's fair to say someday it'll cause a crash. I'll go on record as saying that faulty galley equipment will someday result in a mid-air fire, so lets ban coffee and tea on flights.
Thanks for posting something not from the hip... so it looks like they patented CREATING rich media VIA an internet connection, not plain old rich media internet applications. Once again, sensationalist headlines win out on Slashdot. It's still a shitty patent, and hardly novel, but it's not the wide reaching claim the headline suggests.
Oh man, FLASHBACK, I clearly remember the dark days of DOS memory managers. I was working support at the time, and I remember one of the first questions to ask was what memory manager they were using and how many drivers were loaded into low mem. What a f-ing nightmare. I was so happy when NT came out because that BS was finally going to go away forever. Now, I can just imagine mem mgrs coming full circle and coming back for a visit... on cell phones. I guess the form factor will always limit the expandability so they *should* never be as widely used there, but I wouldn't be too surprised to see it in some form.
More importantly, people tend to only watch sports they've played or participated in. I think sports video games are a decent idea, but the argument becomes, why not just watch real live sports instead? What might work better is the ultra-violent (gonna get some interest group mad here) niche, the likes of which would never happen in real life, and probably be banned from network TV come to think of it. I may not be the target audience, but I can't imagine watching any video game play based on real world sports -or- (like you said) a FPS hide and snipe matchup. However, I might be tempted into watching a Mortal Combat-esque tournament, primarily because you can't hide and hit, and you certainly won't see anything like it on ESPN.
That's interesting, I was just wondering why MS would risk pissing off the carriers (who almost always bundle phones here in the US) when MS Mobile enabled phones on this side of the ocean barely have a toe-hold in the market. The carriers here can litterally make or break a phone. If they see MS as a threat (and they are weary of them at best), they will simply kill off the market for MS Mobile phones and that will be the end of that. Now, if the US gov were to make it illegal to bundle phones, then this might work... makes me wonder what MS's lobbyists in DC are doing this time of year.
Something ain't right about your post. What distro release / cedega release / video card / accelerated driver / X-win system did you use? Considering you state "This is why I use Windows", I find it hard to believe that you'd have the Linux experience to troubleshoot this problem alone. I could easily say I use Linux because Windows doesn't let me do simple tasks like restart the GUI without rebooting, truth is, although it's just 3 keys under Linux, it's still an involved task at the OS level. Anyhow, to get to my point, running a game, while a simple end user task, is one of the most complex tasks (especially detailed games like HL2) that are handled on PCs. Toss in an blind rewrite of a complex layer like DirectX on top of that and you're bound to get shitty end user expierences and over blown expectations. Yeah, I think they have some interesting code there but I wouldn't shed a single tear if they were to disappear tomorrow and (gasp) I think the alternative OS world might actaully be better without them from an expectations angle, your post being a case in point.
People associate Apple with cool, edgy, and young. Meanhile, Microsoft is only geek cool, not nerd cool, and certainly not cool to the general population. People view Microsoft through the cheap, stale,retrictive, crap software they have to deal with at the office. Apple provides an escape from that. It's those flashy computers that you only see in cool Apple stores, not with a $300 rebate coupon at BestBuy. An iPod is a status symbol and the fact that it doesn't play WMA makes it that much cooler to nerds, I doubt the general pop gives a hoot about that lack. iRiver, while making better and even more expensive players, simply does not have the cachet of an iPod in a "that guy couldn't even afford an iPod... what a loser" sense. It plays into the "low end luxury snob" trend that America is so deeply into these days with other non-necessities like Starbucks and high end restaurants.
Apple could always sell OSX without offering any support for non-Apple HW. However, the canabalistic effect on Apple hardware sales is very likely to play out like you mentioned... when's the last time anybody here sat in front of an IBM branded PC that wasn't a laptop?
Slashdot Mirror
I disagree, Microsoft didn't get to where they are using patents, it's their dirty business practices that given them their edge. Yeah, I'd like to see business process, method, and broad moronic patents banned, but that won't help in taking Microsoft to task anytime soon. If they REALLY want to hurt MS, simply ban their products in Europe. What a monster blow that would be, a minimum $6B dollar hit to annual revenue, but likely even higher since many US corps outfit their EU offices from US sourced software. I think an immediate 25% drop in total MS revenues wouldn't be unrealistic .. however ... given the incredible collateral pain that would cause for EU businesses, I can't in any way shape or form see anything even remotely close to that happening.
For once, you can't blame Microsoft for ruining an industry, and I can't say I'll feel sad if McAfee or Symantec dies...
... and I won't shed a single tear either, I'll just add McAfee and Symantec to Corel, Lotus, Netscape and all the other MS roadkill.
I prefer to think of it as if you get into a cage with an 800 pound (and growing) gorilla and a fully grown banana tree, plant your own banana tree, and eat only bananas off your tree, *eventually* that gorilla is going hit 900 punds and decide it's time to rip you into quivering shreds so it can eat your bananas too. It's the price you pay
The thing to me that most sucks was that Stallman and the BSD folks basically made a bet on human nature. The optomists are losing badly.
Sad but true, that's why my preferred license is the LGPL, it's a decent combination of both worlds. You want to incorporate my work unmodified? Fine, nobody loses, the source is still "out there". You want to modify my code and redistribute it? Well, either release those changes or pay me to relicense my code. BSD and GPL are both extremes. With BSD, expect the worst, people will use your work and flip you the bird. With the GPL, expect the worst, people will shun your code if they're forced to open code they want to keep closed. Don't get me wrong, BSD and GPL are both morally superior to the LGPL, but based on human nature, the LGPL offers a good compromise between encouraging use and forcing retribution.
I run up against this shit ALL the time. The best way to win these is to show SAVINGS, not COST. It also helps if you can say that company A, B, and C all use this solution too. However, this is not fool proof, some project mgrs hard link Oracle with DBs, MS with PCs, Sun with servers, and nothing you can say will break them out of that mindset. It's the old, you don't want to be the highest or lowest bidder on a project.
I was just going to suggest that the parent has deved a website used by more than 2 people. You've put it much more eliquently, I especially like the build a dog house vs. build a skyscraper comparison. I'd add, that Java is far more widely known. I can walk away from my code and KNOW somebody will be able to pick up where I left off, customers tend to like that kind of thing.
Unless things have changed very recently, there has never been a cure for any viral infection. Bacterial infections we have a pretty good handle on, but viral infections are particularly nasty because they do their dirty work safely hidden inside cells. We have treatments (see article), and vaccinations, that may allow the immune system to gain the upper hand on a virus, but nothing we have (right now) can effectively target and kill a virus in vivo (the body). This is a pretty broad generalization, but most of the BS posted about potential cures for viral infections are in vitero (test tube) results that wind up being lethal when animal testing begins. Until there's a breakthrough in viral drug targetting, the best we'll be able to do is treat. FWIW, IANAV (I am not a virologist) but I have friends and family that work in the medical profession so I do keep on top of this stuff especially with all the nasty crap floating around these days..
So he really should know better then?
From that one line I deduce that you've never worked at Oracle. There are still some talented people there, but much of the top talent has long since jumped ship.
You're lumping "customizing" and "maintaining" into the same bucket. I often tweak code, we run a lot of tweaked applications at work. However, we don't "maintain" the whole OS/application stack ourselves. Running a diff of a few hundred lines of "customized" code against 3 apps and a few network components is VERY different from "maintaining" the entire OS/application suite. The "maintain" part is the same for Windows and Linux zealots, you run an update against a support server. The code "tweak" part is only possible under Linux/OSS, Windows users *generally* have to live with what they're given, barring a few OSS apps like Apache.
That should be what standard of living does $15K afford you in Hyderbad, India vs. $75K in Seattle, WA? I think the answer is quite a bit lower. Rents in that area of India appear to be quite high compared to the rest of the country. That said, it seems to be a heck of a lot nicer than the rest of the country too! My guess-ti-math is in the 50% lower COL range, about like making $40K in Seattle. Still not terrible for right out of school.
BTW, I'm not ragging on you, just the whole "sell 'em to the 3rd world" movement. The problem is that the per capita income in Sudan is $460 per year, as compared to $40,100 per year in the US. $150 is an impulse level 0.3% of income over here but a whopping 10.9% of income there. To equate the economic impact, that's like selling them for a bargain $4,370.90 here. To make matters worse, Sudanese are a bit more preoccupied with buying food and shelter with that $460 than we are here. You need to visit one of these 3rd world countries to really understand that they have far more pressing issues than getting a wireless tablet. I've never been to Africa, but I've been to Honduras and Haiti and let me tell you, at $2,900 and $1,600 per capita income, the shanty towns in those countries would be Beverly Hills to most Africans. Besides, you need electricity to recharge these things, there is virtually no power grid in most of these poor countries.
Thats not going to happen, at least not in any kinda of short time frame. However, you've got a point, going only DirectX is a dead end. Fact is, DirectX is only Windows and XBox, that means you need to recode to OpenGL for Mac, Linux, PS, Nintendo, etc etc. Moreover, Windows supports OpenGL (XBox can rot in hell). So OpenGL gives you the largest potential customer base of the two. That said, DX offers a very large helper library for sound, input devs, etc. OpenGL's GameGLUT (see GLUT 3.7) takes a step towards creating a proper game helper lib but only time will tell if it will be adopted and expanded.
Since acquiring Suse, they've seen its share of the Linux market shrink compared to Red Hat's.
You have data to back that up? Everything I've seen in the mid to large corp field defies that, with a few SuSE rollouts I know of, at least in Europe and North America, and no new RH rollouts. The reason seems to be that the Novell brand is an easier sale for IT project managers, it's always Novell SuSE, never SuSE alone, and possibly cheaper support contracts? Don't get me wrong, RH still has more boxes out there, but I'm not getting wind of new RH deployments versus SuSE.
configured in under a month.
This would only be possible in a VERY small company rollout and with absolutely no customizations, no legacy data, or legacy workflows. I guarantee you, and yes, I've done several Oracle Apps rollouts, that a company with 1000+ employees has no hope in hell of rolling out a system in anything under 6 months. The average being well over a year. The longest part of these rollouts are getting people to sign off on workflows, the tech piece is a relatively small part of it.
You've never been through a Sarbanes Oxley audit I see ...
Ditto ... Solaris admin turned Linux admin. Still have a few Solaris boxes kicking around but their days are numbered. I have a few Apache servers going but no MySQL or PHP, here it's Oracle and Java. About 90% of Solaris skills transpose directly to Linux.
I love this communistic bullshit line. How in the fcuk do you equate open source software that is free as in speech, not free as in beer, as being communistic? Tell me, which current system of government is (was) defined by free speech and transparency?
Besides, they make us TURN OFF all our electronics during take off and prior to landing. The only time it *should* be an issue is at cruising altitude. Since we've been using our electronics like this for a hell of a long time, I doubt it's fair to say someday it'll cause a crash. I'll go on record as saying that faulty galley equipment will someday result in a mid-air fire, so lets ban coffee and tea on flights.
Thanks for posting something not from the hip ... so it looks like they patented CREATING rich media VIA an internet connection, not plain old rich media internet applications. Once again, sensationalist headlines win out on Slashdot. It's still a shitty patent, and hardly novel, but it's not the wide reaching claim the headline suggests.
Oh man, FLASHBACK, I clearly remember the dark days of DOS memory managers. I was working support at the time, and I remember one of the first questions to ask was what memory manager they were using and how many drivers were loaded into low mem. What a f-ing nightmare. I was so happy when NT came out because that BS was finally going to go away forever. Now, I can just imagine mem mgrs coming full circle and coming back for a visit ... on cell phones. I guess the form factor will always limit the expandability so they *should* never be as widely used there, but I wouldn't be too surprised to see it in some form.
More importantly, people tend to only watch sports they've played or participated in. I think sports video games are a decent idea, but the argument becomes, why not just watch real live sports instead? What might work better is the ultra-violent (gonna get some interest group mad here) niche, the likes of which would never happen in real life, and probably be banned from network TV come to think of it. I may not be the target audience, but I can't imagine watching any video game play based on real world sports -or- (like you said) a FPS hide and snipe matchup. However, I might be tempted into watching a Mortal Combat-esque tournament, primarily because you can't hide and hit, and you certainly won't see anything like it on ESPN.
That's interesting, I was just wondering why MS would risk pissing off the carriers (who almost always bundle phones here in the US) when MS Mobile enabled phones on this side of the ocean barely have a toe-hold in the market. The carriers here can litterally make or break a phone. If they see MS as a threat (and they are weary of them at best), they will simply kill off the market for MS Mobile phones and that will be the end of that. Now, if the US gov were to make it illegal to bundle phones, then this might work ... makes me wonder what MS's lobbyists in DC are doing this time of year.
Yeah ... but it's implemented as an ActiveX control ... so scratch "from your browser" and make that "from IE".
Something ain't right about your post. What distro release / cedega release / video card / accelerated driver / X-win system did you use? Considering you state "This is why I use Windows", I find it hard to believe that you'd have the Linux experience to troubleshoot this problem alone. I could easily say I use Linux because Windows doesn't let me do simple tasks like restart the GUI without rebooting, truth is, although it's just 3 keys under Linux, it's still an involved task at the OS level. Anyhow, to get to my point, running a game, while a simple end user task, is one of the most complex tasks (especially detailed games like HL2) that are handled on PCs. Toss in an blind rewrite of a complex layer like DirectX on top of that and you're bound to get shitty end user expierences and over blown expectations. Yeah, I think they have some interesting code there but I wouldn't shed a single tear if they were to disappear tomorrow and (gasp) I think the alternative OS world might actaully be better without them from an expectations angle, your post being a case in point.
People associate Apple with cool, edgy, and young. Meanhile, Microsoft is only geek cool, not nerd cool, and certainly not cool to the general population. People view Microsoft through the cheap, stale,retrictive, crap software they have to deal with at the office. Apple provides an escape from that. It's those flashy computers that you only see in cool Apple stores, not with a $300 rebate coupon at BestBuy. An iPod is a status symbol and the fact that it doesn't play WMA makes it that much cooler to nerds, I doubt the general pop gives a hoot about that lack. iRiver, while making better and even more expensive players, simply does not have the cachet of an iPod in a "that guy couldn't even afford an iPod ... what a loser" sense. It plays into the "low end luxury snob" trend that America is so deeply into these days with other non-necessities like Starbucks and high end restaurants.
Apple could always sell OSX without offering any support for non-Apple HW. However, the canabalistic effect on Apple hardware sales is very likely to play out like you mentioned ... when's the last time anybody here sat in front of an IBM branded PC that wasn't a laptop?