Okay, fine, so just take my entire comment and put Microsoft branding on all the software I mentioned. The point is that even Microsoft itself isn't just "Windows." They could give away Windows and still have an income stream that they wouldn't know what to do with.
And here's where your analogy starts to leak (and the content of most of this discussion):
Software is not just the operating system. Oh, the OSS zealots will flame me for this, but let's just say that, for your $100 computer, all software titles fell to ten percent of their cost today. For the mass market, woo hoo! Given a $25 OS that comes with a web browser, however faulty, and an e-mail client, they can be underway in short order. Add onto that a "home edition" of a productivity suite for another $10 and a good graphics package a la PhotoDeluxe or one of its commercial competitors for another $10, five or six games for a total of $30, and you've come out with a very usable computer for $175.
But now look at a commercial desktop. Let's say the same $100 worth of hardware does the trick. Your OS is the "Pro" version, costing $40 instead of $25. Then you need a development suite, which will set you back $50, plus something like TOAD for $70. Don't forget the office suite that you can get for the low low price of $25 because you bought in bulk, but it doesn't include the project management component, another $30, nor the superwhammadyne drawing package for another $30. Add to that a scattering of productivity pieces for $7 each ($35 total). Before totalling, though, you have to add in the vertical market software that is required for your industry. They're going to come in at between $250 and $500 for most seats, because even the small time vendors are in with this new 10% pricing paradigm. And, lucky for you, you only need two for each workstation.
So your commercial desktop costs $1130 to put in place, less than 9% of which is the cost of the hardware. See the leak?
So, how do you represent an empty field if not by NULL? Let's say I'm filling out some web site's "profile" form because I want to... um... read a news story that someone linked to. I don't mind putting in my name and e-mail address, but I don't want to fill in my street address or social security number. So the record gets written to the database with my empty fields. How are they represented there?
Does Cherry have any Pear in it? Will there be a code license war coming up between the two?
Also, does anyone here have practical experience with Pear? What's its performance like? I've got a Celeron 1.6 with 512 MB RAM running SUSE 9.1. Can I expect Pear to run like an 800 MHz PPC? 300 MHz maybe?
Interesting concept. The one hole I see is that things in nature are geared to use very little energy to do things, relying on time instead. One reason we have vehicles is that we wanted more energy (faster, faster) to get our tasks done.
Um... Where do you get energy other than from the sun? Excepting the possibility that some of the nuclear fuel we use in reactors actually came from extra-solar asteroids striking the Earth, all our energy comes from the sun. Some of it is just stored a long time in a wide variety of forms.
And the floppy disks were small, too. None of this 1.44 MB stuff, no. We had to put up with 300K. The neighbors had 720K floppies and we were jealous. We walked uphill both ways in the snow to get to their house just to look at their computer and wish we had one. Of course, we were still better than the other neighbors who had a measly Apple ][ with 140K floppy that only worked on one side...
Interesting. Have you tried it? I'm hesitant to believe a lot of the marketing materials put out by companies or projects, particularly in the form of a flashy web page. The proof is in the pudding, as it's said.
For instance, I've been searching for a document management system lately to use as a repository for our company's standards development project. One basic feature we require is that the search engine it provides searches within Word documents. Two OSS projects I looked at, Owl and KnowledgeTree, advertise on their features list that they do this. But if you go try out their online demos, neither product is able to find words embedded in Word documents that exist on their system. In one case, someone had put up a Word document with a single Spanish word in it. I viewed the document, noticed that it was a good candidate for a search (one word, not one likely to be found in another document), then backed out and tried to find the document using that word in the search bar. Nothing.
So, while I'm always interested in OSS projects that can act as replacements for commercial ones, particularly on the server side, I'm reticent to believe their hype before I see their products in action.
When I was getting ready to buy a new laptop earlier this year, I decided that it would be a Linux-only machine (a leap I hadn't made yet at the time). I didn't know what sort of laptop I wanted, and didn't even know which distribution of Linux I would use. I started some research, and in the end selected SUSE for a variety of reasons, though it was a close race for sure. Having that choice out of the way, I browsed their web site and found that IBM laptops, among others, were certified for SUSE 9.0 (9.1 wasn't out yet), and the list of supported IBM machines was long. The one non-certified part was the internal wireless card, but I found by doing some research that the Atheros chipset had drivers, and the generic ones would work (this is actually documented on the IBM site).
So I found a ThinkPad model (R40) that was within my budget, bought it, installed SUSE 9.0 Personal (which I had bought as well), and tried to upgrade to the then-new KDE 3.2 and kernel 2.6. The KDE part failed because of some SUSE integration dependencies. I grumbled about it a while, then just decided to wait for 9.1, due out within weeks. I bought the Pro version of that, and have been happy ever since, except that watching DVDs, which worked in 9.0, no longer seems to work.:-\
Anyhow, I happily surf the net on my wireless laptop, which has all its hardware automagically recognized by SUSE, without troubles. A little up front research made that possible, and I'm glad I did it.
That's really impressive. Up until this moment, I've thought that the reason corporations wouldn't switch to a Mozilla-based browser is that the available functionality of ActiveX, used internally for many applications in the corporate world, wasn't present in Mozilla. I was completely wrong.
What's the over head involved in developing apps like this?
Re:Not as interesting as the Bigelow $50 mil prize
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This sounds a lot like that old wives tale about the US and their $10,000 ink pen that would write in zero g, and the Russians just used a pencil.
Pencils, by the way, shed particulate matter that you don't want careening around your space station getting stuck in things, no matter how small the bits are.
Re:Not as interesting as the Bigelow $50 mil prize
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Actually, that's a good point. Has Rutan made any pronouncements about what the point to point range of his vehicle is? FedEx might have a market opportunity.
"East cost packages in by 2:00 p.m. delivered to L.A., S.F. or Seattle by 2:00 p.m."
In Scaled Composite's defense, none of the others will ever be their equal, nor better, for the mere fact that SC did it first. Others may eventually overcome SC's design, go higher, have faster turnaround, etc. However, Rutan and co. did it first.
Having said all that, I agree with you; I think that annual competitions for different challenges will keep the development going. Highest, fastest, most passengers, whatever, just so the minimum altitude is 100 km.
As far as that goes, any anime movie or series that now gets airtime on G4 is a good example of fringe TV getting facetime in our CABLE (Channels Abound But Little Entertainment) world.
I like anime, or at least some of it (see my blog), but it's definitely not mainstream yet.
The last news report I heard on the radio (I'm in Portland, where on clear days you can see the crater from downtown) said that the expected eruption will probably include "a lot of steam and a few boulders being thrown around." I think they meant boulders being thrown around inside the crater. At least that's what I'm hoping.
Essentially, they're saying just enough about every possibility that, once it's all over, they can claim that they predicted it would happen that way.
Had to laugh at the OP quote, though. Doesn't "SEP" stand for "Somebody Else's Problem"?
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Okay, fine, so just take my entire comment and put Microsoft branding on all the software I mentioned. The point is that even Microsoft itself isn't just "Windows." They could give away Windows and still have an income stream that they wouldn't know what to do with.
Software is not just the operating system. Oh, the OSS zealots will flame me for this, but let's just say that, for your $100 computer, all software titles fell to ten percent of their cost today. For the mass market, woo hoo! Given a $25 OS that comes with a web browser, however faulty, and an e-mail client, they can be underway in short order. Add onto that a "home edition" of a productivity suite for another $10 and a good graphics package a la PhotoDeluxe or one of its commercial competitors for another $10, five or six games for a total of $30, and you've come out with a very usable computer for $175.
But now look at a commercial desktop. Let's say the same $100 worth of hardware does the trick. Your OS is the "Pro" version, costing $40 instead of $25. Then you need a development suite, which will set you back $50, plus something like TOAD for $70. Don't forget the office suite that you can get for the low low price of $25 because you bought in bulk, but it doesn't include the project management component, another $30, nor the superwhammadyne drawing package for another $30. Add to that a scattering of productivity pieces for $7 each ($35 total). Before totalling, though, you have to add in the vertical market software that is required for your industry. They're going to come in at between $250 and $500 for most seats, because even the small time vendors are in with this new 10% pricing paradigm. And, lucky for you, you only need two for each workstation.
So your commercial desktop costs $1130 to put in place, less than 9% of which is the cost of the hardware. See the leak?
The one Al Gore invented, you insensitive clod!
Wouldn't that run your index count way up, ultimately resulting in far, far higher storage and memory requirements?
So, how do you represent an empty field if not by NULL? Let's say I'm filling out some web site's "profile" form because I want to... um... read a news story that someone linked to. I don't mind putting in my name and e-mail address, but I don't want to fill in my street address or social security number. So the record gets written to the database with my empty fields. How are they represented there?
He did say "total" for their stored procedures. I suspect they're in small chunks, but many, many chunks in total.
"...Novell is prepared to use our patents...in the event someone asserts patents against open source products..."
I don't think they're planning any pre-emptive strikes against people who might or might not have LMDs (Litigations of Mass Destruction).
Good point. Two things come to mind:
Does Cherry have any Pear in it? Will there be a code license war coming up between the two?
Also, does anyone here have practical experience with Pear? What's its performance like? I've got a Celeron 1.6 with 512 MB RAM running SUSE 9.1. Can I expect Pear to run like an 800 MHz PPC? 300 MHz maybe?
Well, the technology does seem to be getting better.
Interesting concept. The one hole I see is that things in nature are geared to use very little energy to do things, relying on time instead. One reason we have vehicles is that we wanted more energy (faster, faster) to get our tasks done.
Umm.. No. Read up on the Hindenberg. It was the aluminum paint that caused the problem.
How do you expect to get a gmail invite if you don't have some way of contacting you listed?
Um... Where do you get energy other than from the sun? Excepting the possibility that some of the nuclear fuel we use in reactors actually came from extra-solar asteroids striking the Earth, all our energy comes from the sun. Some of it is just stored a long time in a wide variety of forms.
Got something in English?
And the floppy disks were small, too. None of this 1.44 MB stuff, no. We had to put up with 300K. The neighbors had 720K floppies and we were jealous. We walked uphill both ways in the snow to get to their house just to look at their computer and wish we had one. Of course, we were still better than the other neighbors who had a measly Apple ][ with 140K floppy that only worked on one side...
For instance, I've been searching for a document management system lately to use as a repository for our company's standards development project. One basic feature we require is that the search engine it provides searches within Word documents. Two OSS projects I looked at, Owl and KnowledgeTree, advertise on their features list that they do this. But if you go try out their online demos, neither product is able to find words embedded in Word documents that exist on their system. In one case, someone had put up a Word document with a single Spanish word in it. I viewed the document, noticed that it was a good candidate for a search (one word, not one likely to be found in another document), then backed out and tried to find the document using that word in the search bar. Nothing.
So, while I'm always interested in OSS projects that can act as replacements for commercial ones, particularly on the server side, I'm reticent to believe their hype before I see their products in action.
Um... Take a look at what? Is there a link?
When I was getting ready to buy a new laptop earlier this year, I decided that it would be a Linux-only machine (a leap I hadn't made yet at the time). I didn't know what sort of laptop I wanted, and didn't even know which distribution of Linux I would use. I started some research, and in the end selected SUSE for a variety of reasons, though it was a close race for sure. Having that choice out of the way, I browsed their web site and found that IBM laptops, among others, were certified for SUSE 9.0 (9.1 wasn't out yet), and the list of supported IBM machines was long. The one non-certified part was the internal wireless card, but I found by doing some research that the Atheros chipset had drivers, and the generic ones would work (this is actually documented on the IBM site).
:-\
So I found a ThinkPad model (R40) that was within my budget, bought it, installed SUSE 9.0 Personal (which I had bought as well), and tried to upgrade to the then-new KDE 3.2 and kernel 2.6. The KDE part failed because of some SUSE integration dependencies. I grumbled about it a while, then just decided to wait for 9.1, due out within weeks. I bought the Pro version of that, and have been happy ever since, except that watching DVDs, which worked in 9.0, no longer seems to work.
Anyhow, I happily surf the net on my wireless laptop, which has all its hardware automagically recognized by SUSE, without troubles. A little up front research made that possible, and I'm glad I did it.
That's really impressive. Up until this moment, I've thought that the reason corporations wouldn't switch to a Mozilla-based browser is that the available functionality of ActiveX, used internally for many applications in the corporate world, wasn't present in Mozilla. I was completely wrong.
What's the over head involved in developing apps like this?
This sounds a lot like that old wives tale about the US and their $10,000 ink pen that would write in zero g, and the Russians just used a pencil.
Pencils, by the way, shed particulate matter that you don't want careening around your space station getting stuck in things, no matter how small the bits are.
Actually, that's a good point. Has Rutan made any pronouncements about what the point to point range of his vehicle is? FedEx might have a market opportunity.
"East cost packages in by 2:00 p.m. delivered to L.A., S.F. or Seattle by 2:00 p.m."
Three hours should be enough time, right?
In Scaled Composite's defense, none of the others will ever be their equal, nor better, for the mere fact that SC did it first. Others may eventually overcome SC's design, go higher, have faster turnaround, etc. However, Rutan and co. did it first. Having said all that, I agree with you; I think that annual competitions for different challenges will keep the development going. Highest, fastest, most passengers, whatever, just so the minimum altitude is 100 km.
As far as that goes, any anime movie or series that now gets airtime on G4 is a good example of fringe TV getting facetime in our CABLE (Channels Abound But Little Entertainment) world. I like anime, or at least some of it (see my blog), but it's definitely not mainstream yet.
Essentially, they're saying just enough about every possibility that, once it's all over, they can claim that they predicted it would happen that way.
Had to laugh at the OP quote, though. Doesn't "SEP" stand for "Somebody Else's Problem"?
Ever use OS X? It seems to fit all your requirements.