Unfortunately for this gentleman, he overlooked one major point.
You can't make money off of an OS.
Every sucessful OS on the market is produced by a company that makes it's money off of another product line.
In fact, I can't think of a single company that makes just an OS and is profitable.
There are hardware manufacturers in the OS game like IBM (OS/2, PC-DOS, AIX) Sun (SunOS, Solaris) Apple (MacOS, AU/X, Darwin) SGI (IRIX) DEC (OSF/1) and HP (HPUX).
The one stand-alone OS company, SCO, makes pots of money off of support contracts.
The FreeNIXes use a different business model, of course, but none of the commercial UN*X companys have any illusions that OS sales will help their bottom line. Corel wants you to buy WordPerfect and the rest want you to buy support contracts. BeOS isn't yet profitable. QNX may be the one exception, but real-time OSs are a niche market.
Even Microsoft has made all of it's cash off of Office and BackOffice sales, not off of Windows.
The current best guess around where I work is that the Windows division of Microsoft has maybe 5 years before they go under. If they get into the support contract game they might have a chance, but selling just an OS and nothing else is the path to bankruptcy.
If Apple thinks that OSX is the cure for their ills, they better start building x86 boxes to sell it with if they plan to make a profit. That's the only way that MacOS has made them any money so far, the harware that it runs on is horrendously overpriced. (No flames please, I used to sell Macs and I saw the markup)
Apple will continue to fill it's hardware market and please it's quite loyal users with a more powerful and supposedly more configurable OS. The rest of the world will see OSX run on x86 hardware, go "That's nice," and keep using what they use now.
I run RH 6.1 with KDE on my Dell Latitude CPi. VMWare contains the copy of Win2K on it that my employer has infected me with. It runs fine (Well, as fine as Win2K can be expected to run.)
IAATP (I am a terrible programmer) so if someone would create an add-on so that kmail (or any other decent desktop mail app) would pull mail from an Exchange server (POP and IMAP not allowed) I'll buy them beers. Then I can make Win2K go away.
Having crawled over around and through the cockpit of the Hornet for 3 years and being quailfied to run engines on the ground I can assure you that the throttles move. I've helped replace and rig the throttle cables that run from the throttle console to the main fuel control of each engine. The stick is fly-by-wire in the Hornet, but it has the standard setup of bellcranks and linkages that link to electronic and mechanical backup systems for flight control.
You are probably thinking of the control stick of the Lockheed (formerly General Dynamics) F-16 Fighting Falcon. The original design for the stick was for it to be stationary and it does indeed operate entirely from pressure. However, it does move. The stationary stick so irritated pilots that GD relented and redesigned the stick so that it moves (not as much as other tactical aircraft, but it does move.)
At the base level, it comes to the same thing. Money bought both the food and the hard drive. So the root of the matter is poverty and whether or not someone standing around wringing their hands over the terrible conditions in a foreign land is doing a damn thing about it.
The original poster was whining about sharing and caring. If he cared that much, he wouldn't be posting on/. He'd be on a fucking plane to go help.
I give to several charities, all of which are dedicated to building infrastructure and not sending a bag of rice that is gone in a day. I donate time to help people in this country that are less well off. I don't need to listen to some whiner complaining that I don't do enough.
Ignorance can be cured with education. Stupidity like yours cannot be so I'll post for the benefit of the other readers.
Actually I know quite a bit about cash cropping. And I also know that the forcing body in those countries is not "the policies of the West and its agent, the World Bank" but the government and major landholders in those countries.
Just another hand-wringing America-blamer. Get over it. Lots of countries in the world are all fucked up and America only helped some of them get that way. The rest managed to get fucked up all by themselves.
I've got three bags of Ramen noodles and three boxes of store brand macaroni and cheese in my cabinet. I'll send half of it to a family in Bangledesh.
You have X amount of hard drive space on your computer. Set me up and account so I can use half of it.
Fair, no?
Of course not. You pay for your computer equipment and for your bandwidth. I paid for my food. Just because someone somewhere is starving and I'm hard drive poor doesn't mean that we should run out and give up what we have.
When the rest of the world works as hard and as smart as farmers in this country have to provide food, then it will be equitable to share food with those countries. But if they did that, we wouldn't NEED to share.
And no, I'm not blaming the people out in the field. Farmers in Bangladesh probably work as hard if not harder than American farmers to produce a crop. Their government, however, likely is the cause of the problem. Soviet Russia had that problem for years. As long as food was grown in the "politically correct" way, people nearly starved. The tiny plots of land that people kept behind their houses fed most of the country. Today, of course, the Russian mafia intercepts the large amount of food coming from the Russian countryside and dumps it to keep prices high.
My ancestors braved much hardship to bring their family to this country so that we, their descendants, would have the opportunity to live well. And we have. The poor starving people of the world have three choices. They can rise up against their oppressive government and overthrow it in favor of a representative republic, they can move to a representative republic, or they can live like they do now. Sending them checks and food only prolongs the condition they are in.
As I said when the first article first came out, Linux is part of the Open Source movement and is NOT part of the standard Business As Usual(TM) marketing world.
I'm amazed that he isn't being roasted alive with flames. Let's say I build a hovercar. It goes vertical, it uses a fusion drive engine, it only has to be refueld once a decade, and the collision avoidance system warns me whenever I get too close to something. This guy comes along, pushes a few buttons and says:
All the other cars have those round rubber things, this one should too.
It goes up? The other cars don't go up.
Why is it yelling at me when I do something dumb? My car doesn't do that.
Then he writes up an article saying that my invention is inferior because it doesn't fit into the vision of what he thinks a car should be.
Tough, bucko. Linux is based on a different model, a distributed model. By trying to force it into the vertical software development mold breaks the model. You can't build Linux like you build Windows and still have Linux. It would be completely different software.
I agree that the Linux community is often it's own worst enemy, but the author fatally misunderstands the open-source model.
Having marketing push bloated, untested products out the door is why you have so many angry people in the first place. If you insist that open-source software replace close-source software in this manner, you have gained nothing. You will end up with a large, bloated, buggy, over-hyped software package...along with the source code. Whoopee.
No, the open-source model is about distributing the workload across volunteers and shipping a product when it is ready, not when marketing wants it shipped. No one is going to be able to force a group of volunteers into an artificial time line. The model will break down.
The author is just another one of those closed-sourcers that think that open-source is just a fad and that in order to be accepted, we will have to do what they did. Wrong. That's not how anyone has ever succeeded. You succeed by doing things the way no one else has done it.
Once a week some group decides that some term or symbol or other is offensive. Tough. If I were to say something obviously derrogatory about your religion, I wouldn't do it by using some sly, obscure term. I'd come right out and say it.
So get over it. If I tried to go through life not offending anyone, I'd have to lock my doors and never leave the house. In an age where we can debate whether or not oral sex is sex, whether a lie is a lie or an untrue statement and murder in a foreign country is called a police action I'm not going to get bent out of shape over some label.
You call me whatever you want to. I'll call you what I want to. We will both get over it.
I concur. Jon Katz has a remarkable ability to jump on the boor bandwagon.
DISCLAIMER: I am not a xtian, right-wing or otherwise.
The right-wing xtians have a point. They tend to almost always screw up the execution, but they are onto the right idea. Namely, the lack of morals and ethics is making government impossible. If we eschew morals we cannot govern ourselves and therefore we have no authority to govern others.
The right-wing xtians tend to get noticed because they are loud. They have to be because the other side, the forces of situational ethics, anti-accountability and variable morals per social standing are currently in power.
Don't get me wrong. Giving up my rights for the right-wingers god is just as distasteful as giving up my rights for "the children."
My beef is that Katz zeros in on the right-wing xtians as liberty stealers but ignores the rest of the liberty stealers out there.
Take note, Jon. What god you pray to has nothing to do with whether you want to take what I have. All it takes is an evil mind.
The point isn't that it is possible or impossible. The point is that they can now legally monitor any traffic they wish to.
If Russian Peasant X is under suspicion, they tap his Internet connection at his ISP. The ISP is aware of the law and doesn't squeak. Peasant X is monitored until they have enough to convict him and off he goes to Lefortovo.
Compare that to the legal system in the US. If Citizen A falls under suspicion, the "proper authorities" get a warrant and tap your phone line. If your data is unencrypted, they gather data until they have enought to convict and off you go to Leavenworth.
The US system of phone lines is largely digital and taps are almost impossible to detect. In Russia, the phone lines are analog and tapping them makes all kinds of hisses and clicks and drops the line voltage. The wiring system at COs is so messy that just going in to set a tap is likely to take out phone service for a city block. It's much easier to tap at the ISP. This law makes that possible.
The Russian FSB won't be sitting there monitoring all data on the line. As many here have said, that's technically infeasible (not impossible, just very difficult.) What they WILL be doing is setting themselves up to be able to monitor certain "suspected criminals" at regular intervals and a current criminal suspect as soon as the need to do so arises.
And a typical elitist left-winger chimes in. Now they want to follow through; just let them do their job. Translation - Shut up, Bubba and Algore are smarter than you (Didn't Dan Rather tell you that?) so go back to your cube, you little geek, and let someone as smart as Bubba do the thinking and the spending for you.
I have news for you, Mister. No, I don't listen to National Proletariat Radio, no, I don't watch PBS or CBS or any of the other BS's. The only time I check in on broadcast television is when I want to see what the socialists are saying they want to take away from me this week.
I get my news from radical militia mongers like the Wall Street Journal and the Fox News website and yes,/. And I worry when ever the White House jumps in to grab some glory at the end of a decade-long court battle.
Check your copy of the Constitution. Microsoft's future is in the hands of the Judicial Branch and the White House has no say in what Judge Jackson decides. None. They can whine and carp and put forth strongly worded statements, but they are still just bystanders.
They and you should take a hint. Do what bystanders do. Just stand by. Judge Jackson will get back to you with Microsoft's fate.
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Source:
http://biz.yahoo.com/p/b/beos.html
Per Share Data
Book Value (mrq) $0.74
Earnings (ttm) -$2.12
Earnings (mrq) -$0.17
Sales (ttm) $0.10
Cash (mrq) $0.75
Valuation Ratios
Price/Book (mrq) 9.54
Price/Earnings N/A
Price/Sales 68.05
Income Statements
Sales (ttm) $2.60M
EBITDA (ttm) -$20.1M
Income available to common (ttm) -$24.8M
Management Effectiveness
Return on Assets (ttm) -107.17%
Return on Equity (ttm) -645.59%
They are NOT profitable. Wishing it so doesn't make it true.
Unfortunately for this gentleman, he overlooked one major point.
You can't make money off of an OS.
Every sucessful OS on the market is produced by a company that makes it's money off of another product line.
In fact, I can't think of a single company that makes just an OS and is profitable.
There are hardware manufacturers in the OS game like IBM (OS/2, PC-DOS, AIX) Sun (SunOS, Solaris) Apple (MacOS, AU/X, Darwin) SGI (IRIX) DEC (OSF/1) and HP (HPUX).
The one stand-alone OS company, SCO, makes pots of money off of support contracts.
The FreeNIXes use a different business model, of course, but none of the commercial UN*X companys have any illusions that OS sales will help their bottom line. Corel wants you to buy WordPerfect and the rest want you to buy support contracts. BeOS isn't yet profitable. QNX may be the one exception, but real-time OSs are a niche market.
Even Microsoft has made all of it's cash off of Office and BackOffice sales, not off of Windows.
The current best guess around where I work is that the Windows division of Microsoft has maybe 5 years before they go under. If they get into the support contract game they might have a chance, but selling just an OS and nothing else is the path to bankruptcy.
If Apple thinks that OSX is the cure for their ills, they better start building x86 boxes to sell it with if they plan to make a profit. That's the only way that MacOS has made them any money so far, the harware that it runs on is horrendously overpriced. (No flames please, I used to sell Macs and I saw the markup)
Apple will continue to fill it's hardware market and please it's quite loyal users with a more powerful and supposedly more configurable OS. The rest of the world will see OSX run on x86 hardware, go "That's nice," and keep using what they use now.
I run RH 6.1 with KDE on my Dell Latitude CPi. VMWare contains the copy of Win2K on it that my employer has infected me with. It runs fine (Well, as fine as Win2K can be expected to run.)
IAATP (I am a terrible programmer) so if someone would create an add-on so that kmail (or any other decent desktop mail app) would pull mail from an Exchange server (POP and IMAP not allowed) I'll buy them beers. Then I can make Win2K go away.
Having crawled over around and through the cockpit of the Hornet for 3 years and being quailfied to run engines on the ground I can assure you that the throttles move. I've helped replace and rig the throttle cables that run from the throttle console to the main fuel control of each engine. The stick is fly-by-wire in the Hornet, but it has the standard setup of bellcranks and linkages that link to electronic and mechanical backup systems for flight control.
You are probably thinking of the control stick of the Lockheed (formerly General Dynamics) F-16 Fighting Falcon. The original design for the stick was for it to be stationary and it does indeed operate entirely from pressure. However, it does move. The stationary stick so irritated pilots that GD relented and redesigned the stick so that it moves (not as much as other tactical aircraft, but it does move.)
Collaberating.
At least in Vichy.
At the base level, it comes to the same thing. Money bought both the food and the hard drive. So the root of the matter is poverty and whether or not someone standing around wringing their hands over the terrible conditions in a foreign land is doing a damn thing about it.
/. He'd be on a fucking plane to go help.
;)
The original poster was whining about sharing and caring. If he cared that much, he wouldn't be posting on
I give to several charities, all of which are dedicated to building infrastructure and not sending a bag of rice that is gone in a day. I donate time to help people in this country that are less well off. I don't need to listen to some whiner complaining that I don't do enough.
I get enough of that at work.
Ignorance can be cured with education. Stupidity like yours cannot be so I'll post for the benefit of the other readers.
Actually I know quite a bit about cash cropping. And I also know that the forcing body in those countries is not "the policies of the West and its agent, the World Bank" but the government and major landholders in those countries.
Just another hand-wringing America-blamer. Get over it. Lots of countries in the world are all fucked up and America only helped some of them get that way. The rest managed to get fucked up all by themselves.
I'm really cool with this idea.
I've got three bags of Ramen noodles and three boxes of store brand macaroni and cheese in my cabinet. I'll send half of it to a family in Bangledesh.
You have X amount of hard drive space on your computer. Set me up and account so I can use half of it.
Fair, no?
Of course not. You pay for your computer equipment and for your bandwidth. I paid for my food. Just because someone somewhere is starving and I'm hard drive poor doesn't mean that we should run out and give up what we have.
When the rest of the world works as hard and as smart as farmers in this country have to provide food, then it will be equitable to share food with those countries. But if they did that, we wouldn't NEED to share.
And no, I'm not blaming the people out in the field. Farmers in Bangladesh probably work as hard if not harder than American farmers to produce a crop. Their government, however, likely is the cause of the problem. Soviet Russia had that problem for years. As long as food was grown in the "politically correct" way, people nearly starved. The tiny plots of land that people kept behind their houses fed most of the country. Today, of course, the Russian mafia intercepts the large amount of food coming from the Russian countryside and dumps it to keep prices high.
My ancestors braved much hardship to bring their family to this country so that we, their descendants, would have the opportunity to live well. And we have. The poor starving people of the world have three choices. They can rise up against their oppressive government and overthrow it in favor of a representative republic, they can move to a representative republic, or they can live like they do now. Sending them checks and food only prolongs the condition they are in.
Hard facts, hard choices, but life is hard.
You are trolling.
If you would actually read the exploit you'd realize that the problem existed in ALL versions of SSH as well as OpenSSH.
Indeed, there are no fixes for the standard SSH client, but the OpenSSH client put out by OpenBSD has been patched.
As I said when the first article first came out, Linux is part of the Open Source movement and is NOT part of the standard Business As Usual(TM) marketing world.
I'm amazed that he isn't being roasted alive with flames. Let's say I build a hovercar. It goes vertical, it uses a fusion drive engine, it only has to be refueld once a decade, and the collision avoidance system warns me whenever I get too close to something. This guy comes along, pushes a few buttons and says:
All the other cars have those round rubber things, this one should too.
It goes up? The other cars don't go up.
Why is it yelling at me when I do something dumb? My car doesn't do that.
Then he writes up an article saying that my invention is inferior because it doesn't fit into the vision of what he thinks a car should be.
Tough, bucko. Linux is based on a different model, a distributed model. By trying to force it into the vertical software development mold breaks the model. You can't build Linux like you build Windows and still have Linux. It would be completely different software.
Having marketing push bloated, untested products out the door is why you have so many angry people in the first place. If you insist that open-source software replace close-source software in this manner, you have gained nothing. You will end up with a large, bloated, buggy, over-hyped software package...along with the source code. Whoopee.
No, the open-source model is about distributing the workload across volunteers and shipping a product when it is ready, not when marketing wants it shipped. No one is going to be able to force a group of volunteers into an artificial time line. The model will break down.
The author is just another one of those closed-sourcers that think that open-source is just a fad and that in order to be accepted, we will have to do what they did. Wrong. That's not how anyone has ever succeeded. You succeed by doing things the way no one else has done it.
Ummmm...you're right. I don't care.
Once a week some group decides that some term or symbol or other is offensive. Tough. If I were to say something obviously derrogatory about your religion, I wouldn't do it by using some sly, obscure term. I'd come right out and say it.
So get over it. If I tried to go through life not offending anyone, I'd have to lock my doors and never leave the house. In an age where we can debate whether or not oral sex is sex, whether a lie is a lie or an untrue statement and murder in a foreign country is called a police action I'm not going to get bent out of shape over some label.
You call me whatever you want to. I'll call you what I want to. We will both get over it.
DISCLAIMER: I am not a xtian, right-wing or otherwise.
The right-wing xtians have a point. They tend to almost always screw up the execution, but they are onto the right idea. Namely, the lack of morals and ethics is making government impossible. If we eschew morals we cannot govern ourselves and therefore we have no authority to govern others.
The right-wing xtians tend to get noticed because they are loud. They have to be because the other side, the forces of situational ethics, anti-accountability and variable morals per social standing are currently in power.
Don't get me wrong. Giving up my rights for the right-wingers god is just as distasteful as giving up my rights for "the children."
My beef is that Katz zeros in on the right-wing xtians as liberty stealers but ignores the rest of the liberty stealers out there.
Take note, Jon. What god you pray to has nothing to do with whether you want to take what I have. All it takes is an evil mind.
Or clones of Al Gore!! No, wait, we already have enough wooden Indians.
If Russian Peasant X is under suspicion, they tap his Internet connection at his ISP. The ISP is aware of the law and doesn't squeak. Peasant X is monitored until they have enough to convict him and off he goes to Lefortovo.
Compare that to the legal system in the US. If Citizen A falls under suspicion, the "proper authorities" get a warrant and tap your phone line. If your data is unencrypted, they gather data until they have enought to convict and off you go to Leavenworth.
The US system of phone lines is largely digital and taps are almost impossible to detect. In Russia, the phone lines are analog and tapping them makes all kinds of hisses and clicks and drops the line voltage. The wiring system at COs is so messy that just going in to set a tap is likely to take out phone service for a city block. It's much easier to tap at the ISP. This law makes that possible.
The Russian FSB won't be sitting there monitoring all data on the line. As many here have said, that's technically infeasible (not impossible, just very difficult.) What they WILL be doing is setting themselves up to be able to monitor certain "suspected criminals" at regular intervals and a current criminal suspect as soon as the need to do so arises.
And a typical elitist left-winger chimes in. Now they want to follow through; just let them do their job. Translation - Shut up, Bubba and Algore are smarter than you (Didn't Dan Rather tell you that?) so go back to your cube, you little geek, and let someone as smart as Bubba do the thinking and the spending for you.
/. And I worry when ever the White House jumps in to grab some glory at the end of a decade-long court battle.
I have news for you, Mister. No, I don't listen to National Proletariat Radio, no, I don't watch PBS or CBS or any of the other BS's. The only time I check in on broadcast television is when I want to see what the socialists are saying they want to take away from me this week.
I get my news from radical militia mongers like the Wall Street Journal and the Fox News website and yes,
Check your copy of the Constitution. Microsoft's future is in the hands of the Judicial Branch and the White House has no say in what Judge Jackson decides. None. They can whine and carp and put forth strongly worded statements, but they are still just bystanders.
They and you should take a hint. Do what bystanders do. Just stand by. Judge Jackson will get back to you with Microsoft's fate.
KB