I'm know there have been heaps of comments on the situation here in Aus with the incumbant Telco screwing consumers, businesses and resellers with an atrocious level of customer service.
I also love the US./'ers telling us that's because we are socialists.
All through my Eco degree they told us that nothing is as efficient as a perfectly competative free market with no Govt. intervention. It just wasn't until third year they admitted that one of those markets still had to be found in the wild!
The last I heard was that a US free trade delegation (we are pretty open here) was lobbying for the govt to sell the incumbant Telco as it breached WTO guidelines, or at least major US Telcos interpretation of them.
Let's see, lamb, beef, sugar, wheat, steel...You want free markets, this sounds like one
Hands up who is surprised. It's standard business practice for MS.
Hands up who is surprised. It's standard business practice for MS.
Someone develops a valuable application of an open standard
Make a poor copy the functionality and bundle it
Gain wide acceptance
Bastardise the standard
Lock out competition
Discover security flaws introduced by poor implementation
Discontinue free/standalone version
Issue fix in upgraded version of Windows
Gates calls
on FCC to examine AIM (ZDnet)18 Dec 2000 - Microsoft chairman Bill Gates
telephoned the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission last week to
urge a close examination of America Online's dominance in instant messaging,
a Microsoft representative confirmed.
Leading
Technology and Instant Messaging Companies Form IMUnified (The Devil Himself)
- One of the things that makes this coalition so exciting is the opportunity
to work together and learn from each other so that we can create a system that
is even more private and more secure than what is available today, said
Yusuf Mehdi, vice president of MSN at Microsoft Corp.
AT this stage, I think we are only at stage 6 of the product lifecycle. Although
the IETF announced Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP)
almost a year ago, IBM and Microsoft have promoted a separate standard known
as SIMPLE (SIP for Instant Messaging and Presence Leveraging Extensions). As
IM becomes more important in the corporate sector the issue really starts to
revolve around this proposed standard and the conditions under which it will
be available or licenced.
There has to ba a law against the blatant acts of consumers expressing an opinion which interrupts the fundamental right of corporations to milk consumers of every last hard earned cent.
The right to make monopoly profits and distort the operation of the market until the end of time without adding to the collective knowledge and advancement of the human race must be upheld at all costs. The regurgitation of lowest common denominator "entertainment" which provides nothing new, challenging or interesting should provide at least a 200% return, regardless of how overbudget a piece of crap is, is fundamental to the health of the western economy.
Expect larger political donations from the movie industry soon as they are obviously lagging behind the RIAA.
A Better Tomorrow I & II, Bullet in the Head.
I suspect this one's gonna suck like it was a Hollywood film.
Kill Bill however sounds much more deserving of my Sth Pacific Peso's.
Totally missing the point - As people upgrade Windows and lose all the "functionality" of OE, the script kiddies will have nothing to do. Well maybe go outside and play a sport.
Can only be a good thing if everyone gets a.NETpassport - we all know how secure Hotmail is. This can only lead to a reduction in spam and worms, freeing bandwidth for all;-)
The flip-side is that it will free all those MS developers engaged in patching this piece of @#$ to write something truly original and useful.
REJOYCE and denounce your anti-MS cynicism
Read the pdf, what a hodge-podge of unsupported statements. Firstly it is written from the perspective of the "Sponsoring" software companies. As pointed out, it totally ignores the fact that 99% of Government funded in-house code is for internal use. Why? Perhaps because they have specailist needs. How many Defence Departments or Internal Revenue agencies does any nation have.
Suddenly the premise that commercial software houses "do so in order to supply the software on a repeating basis and thereby to generate licensing revenues that allow them to make a profit on their investment" becomes null and void.
Governments do create or sponsor code for distribution to end users or clients, particularly in Health and Internal Revenue. Much of this is distributed free in the interest of eGovernment and reducing costs to the taxpayer. The development platform here is dependant on what the client machines have (usually Win95/98) and they can code it in VB if they are stupid enough. A large segment of the economy is still run on clipper code.
"Such a proposal would inevitably act as a deterrent to commercial involvement in Government sponsored R&D software projects because they would have such a limited opportunity to exploit any commercial gain from any privately owned IPR.." So this reads like they expect to profit from Government funded R&D, I thought this was where stendards otfen arose from due to the long term investment and the free rider effect. Normally, when a company pays you to write code they own the IP and I fail to see why this should not be the case with the application of public money. This effect was again raised yesterday by Hans Reiser. US style Corporate Welfare is perhaps not that appealing to the rest of the world.
Some other points;
Lack of adequate competition in the bid process.....
What they are really saying is that "we want to be protected from competition". Especially from small independant development firms that may be able to deliver on a more cost effective manner and with much less overhead. That would be worse that government bodies buying the development tools and coding it themselves.
Software that would not include leading edge developments.......
Like corporates and Governments implementing JAVA and web services and not waiting for.NET
This doesn't mean "we have established products and would like you to help protect the monopoly positions we have created by lack of interoperability
Very basic software which would only provide minimally useful solutions.....
Ah yeah, like "Hello, Microsoft. We are thinking of standardising on WinServer2003 if you could add...".
Confidentiality issues....
Well dont release the code. And if you do, don't copy any privacy law protected personal data into it.
And finally "For the reasons discussed the setting of a default position for use of restrictive licences such as the GPL, brings with it some commercial disadvantages that may in some cases outweigh the benefits." Read any MS EULA.
I would be interested to see the role IBM really has in this as it smacks of biting the hand, Linux and JAVA seem to be a large factor in the slowing down in the death of the mainframe.
I hope I haven't taken any quotes out of context, but they really need to be speaking to someone like Richard Alston in Australia.
Most seem to be missing the point here. SAP is pretty committed to being platform agnostic and standards compliant. The main R/3 ERP runs on NT, AIX, HP-UX, OS390, Solaris, Linux etc and databases such as SQL server, DB2, Oracle, Informix and SAPDB
SAP sells to the users management, not the IT department, and have you tried to dictate to them what platform to run? Especially a big corporate data centre with mainframes etc.
If you ask SAP for a recommended platform for a component, they'll tell you to use one of the supported platforms and not a specific vendor. That's how they maintain the relationships with all vendors like MS, IBM and Oracle.
SAP has been making a concerted effort to support linux (well Red Hat) for about five years and almost all components are supported, I only know of one in beta and not supported for productive use. If there is demand to run on linux, then they will meet that demand. The last thing they want is to be only MS or IBM, cutting off potential sales and the associated TCO issues affecting the product's sales viability.
This becomes especially important as they approach market saturation in the Fortune 1000 space and look towards SME's.
This could represent a big opportunity to the open source community as SAP spends serious $$$ on platform support and R&D (not games consoles and Bluetooth Keyboards). SAP support of an Open Source database WILL give the platform some serious datacentre cred.
After a quick read, trying to figure how this will significantly differ from the SAP and SAP/WebMethods stuff I have been doing for a year.
When it eventuates, that is.
Slashdot Mirror
I have to admit I loved the original Bob the Builder story. This sounds like a cool opportunity for marketing a "Tourettes Cindy".
I'm know there have been heaps of comments on the situation here in Aus with the incumbant Telco screwing consumers, businesses and resellers with an atrocious level of customer service.
I also love the US ./'ers telling us that's because we are socialists.
All through my Eco degree they told us that nothing is as efficient as a perfectly competative free market with no Govt. intervention. It just wasn't until third year they admitted that one of those markets still had to be found in the wild!
The last I heard was that a US free trade delegation (we are pretty open here) was lobbying for the govt to sell the incumbant Telco as it breached WTO guidelines, or at least major US Telcos interpretation of them.
Let's see, lamb, beef, sugar, wheat, steel...You want free markets, this sounds like one
If mars had nude-beaches then this would be really popular and be in the real spirit of the internet.
Nah, cover it with cheese and zap it in the microwave 'till it goes dry and crusty on top.
Hands up who is surprised. It's standard business practice for MS.
Hands up who is surprised. It's standard business practice for MS.
Gates calls on FCC to examine AIM (ZDnet)18 Dec 2000 - Microsoft chairman Bill Gates telephoned the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission last week to urge a close examination of America Online's dominance in instant messaging, a Microsoft representative confirmed.
Leading Technology and Instant Messaging Companies Form IMUnified (The Devil Himself) - One of the things that makes this coalition so exciting is the opportunity to work together and learn from each other so that we can create a system that is even more private and more secure than what is available today, said Yusuf Mehdi, vice president of MSN at Microsoft Corp.
AT this stage, I think we are only at stage 6 of the product lifecycle. Although the IETF announced Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) almost a year ago, IBM and Microsoft have promoted a separate standard known as SIMPLE (SIP for Instant Messaging and Presence Leveraging Extensions). As IM becomes more important in the corporate sector the issue really starts to revolve around this proposed standard and the conditions under which it will be available or licenced.
Don't know where you come from mate, but here it's toast and vegemite.
./ cultural differences are embraced. Sh!t, some people even eat marmalade.
But then on
There has to ba a law against the blatant acts of consumers expressing an opinion which interrupts the fundamental right of corporations to milk consumers of every last hard earned cent.
The right to make monopoly profits and distort the operation of the market until the end of time without adding to the collective knowledge and advancement of the human race must be upheld at all costs. The regurgitation of lowest common denominator "entertainment" which provides nothing new, challenging or interesting should provide at least a 200% return, regardless of how overbudget a piece of crap is, is fundamental to the health of the western economy.
Expect larger political donations from the movie industry soon as they are obviously lagging behind the RIAA.
A Better Tomorrow I & II, Bullet in the Head. I suspect this one's gonna suck like it was a Hollywood film. Kill Bill however sounds much more deserving of my Sth Pacific Peso's.
Yep, kinda just slop it on in globs.
Totally missing the point - As people upgrade Windows and lose all the "functionality" of OE, the script kiddies will have nothing to do. Well maybe go outside and play a sport. Can only be a good thing if everyone gets a .NETpassport - we all know how secure Hotmail is. This can only lead to a reduction in spam and worms, freeing bandwidth for all ;-)
The flip-side is that it will free all those MS developers engaged in patching this piece of @#$ to write something truly original and useful.
REJOYCE and denounce your anti-MS cynicism
THere's a whole heap of vulnerabilities yet to be implemented to give a fully rich and satisfying "user eXPerience".
Hopefully storage capacity can keep pace so I can install Windows to utilise all that grunt properly.
I started to miss it and set an NT BSOD as the KDE wallpaper on my laptop. Freaked one of the clients (outsourced) tech support monkeys.
My 4mb Mac CX ran Word and Excel faster then my current 2.8 GHz / 512 MB laptop. Waiting for a 3D/VR BSOD.
Read the pdf, what a hodge-podge of unsupported statements. Firstly it is written from the perspective of the "Sponsoring" software companies. As pointed out, it totally ignores the fact that 99% of Government funded in-house code is for internal use. Why? Perhaps because they have specailist needs. How many Defence Departments or Internal Revenue agencies does any nation have.
Suddenly the premise that commercial software houses "do so in order to supply the software on a repeating basis and thereby to generate licensing revenues that allow them to make a profit on their investment" becomes null and void.
Governments do create or sponsor code for distribution to end users or clients, particularly in Health and Internal Revenue. Much of this is distributed free in the interest of eGovernment and reducing costs to the taxpayer. The development platform here is dependant on what the client machines have (usually Win95/98) and they can code it in VB if they are stupid enough. A large segment of the economy is still run on clipper code.
"Such a proposal would inevitably act as a deterrent to commercial involvement in Government sponsored R&D software projects because they would have such a limited opportunity to exploit any commercial gain from any privately owned IPR.." So this reads like they expect to profit from Government funded R&D, I thought this was where stendards otfen arose from due to the long term investment and the free rider effect. Normally, when a company pays you to write code they own the IP and I fail to see why this should not be the case with the application of public money. This effect was again raised yesterday by Hans Reiser. US style Corporate Welfare is perhaps not that appealing to the rest of the world.
Some other points;
Lack of adequate competition in the bid process.....
What they are really saying is that "we want to be protected from competition". Especially from small independant development firms that may be able to deliver on a more cost effective manner and with much less overhead. That would be worse that government bodies buying the development tools and coding it themselves.
Software that would not include leading edge developments.......
Like corporates and Governments implementing JAVA and web services and not waiting for .NET
This doesn't mean "we have established products and would like you to help protect the monopoly positions we have created by lack of interoperability
Very basic software which would only provide minimally useful solutions.....
Ah yeah, like "Hello, Microsoft. We are thinking of standardising on WinServer2003 if you could add...".
Confidentiality issues....
Well dont release the code. And if you do, don't copy any privacy law protected personal data into it.
And finally "For the reasons discussed the setting of a default position for use of restrictive licences such as the GPL, brings with it some commercial disadvantages that may in some cases outweigh the benefits." Read any MS EULA.
I would be interested to see the role IBM really has in this as it smacks of biting the hand, Linux and JAVA seem to be a large factor in the slowing down in the death of the mainframe.
I hope I haven't taken any quotes out of context, but they really need to be speaking to someone like Richard Alston in Australia.
Step 2 is to build a scalable, stable COST EFFECTIVE platform/OS to run it on.
A legislative dilemma for the US Congress?
Most seem to be missing the point here. SAP is pretty committed to being platform agnostic and standards compliant. The main R/3 ERP runs on NT, AIX, HP-UX, OS390, Solaris, Linux etc and databases such as SQL server, DB2, Oracle, Informix and SAPDB
SAP sells to the users management, not the IT department, and have you tried to dictate to them what platform to run? Especially a big corporate data centre with mainframes etc.
If you ask SAP for a recommended platform for a component, they'll tell you to use one of the supported platforms and not a specific vendor. That's how they maintain the relationships with all vendors like MS, IBM and Oracle.
SAP has been making a concerted effort to support linux (well Red Hat) for about five years and almost all components are supported, I only know of one in beta and not supported for productive use. If there is demand to run on linux, then they will meet that demand. The last thing they want is to be only MS or IBM, cutting off potential sales and the associated TCO issues affecting the product's sales viability.This becomes especially important as they approach market saturation in the Fortune 1000 space and look towards SME's.
This could represent a big opportunity to the open source community as SAP spends serious $$$ on platform support and R&D (not games consoles and Bluetooth Keyboards). SAP support of an Open Source database WILL give the platform some serious datacentre cred.
After a quick read, trying to figure how this will significantly differ from the SAP and SAP/WebMethods stuff I have been doing for a year. When it eventuates, that is.