What if *gasp* They actually USE some of what they license, or do in SCO's eyes? Does that make it such that they have to continue to pay SCO's royalties from now until whenever they decide to be sued by SCO, if SCO were to somehow actually win against IBM/SuSE/RedHat/World?
As much as I want to see SCO stomped into the ground, I'll admit that if SCO wins, This would be a nice form of poetic justice...
Does the browser call a new java runtime layer, so it's a java layer running a web browser running a java layer, or does the original java layer detect the attempt to run Java and intercept to run it itself?
What happens if I run the java web browser in a web browser?
"So what if there are multiple implementations? The vendor simply supplies a cable that goes from Mini-USB to standard USB B connector, like the 6-in-one card reader I bought last week (and returned because it wouldn't mount any media under Linux, but I digress)."
Ah, but there lies the problem. It's not like a laptop which generally will have a carry-bag with it, it's a wristwatch. The more extra parts, the worse it is for quick use, and the less likely it will be to be actually used. It'll also get negative reviews, from people having to carry around this stupid adapter in addition to a watch whose band is patent-pending rather than patent-leather, and would, in my opinion, not be worth buying.
"Why is the cable on the watach and not vice-versa?"
Probably because it would feel a lot worse to have a small plastic rounded watch band, and you would then also have to remove the watch to make use of it. If you're a contortionist, you don't have to now.
"Why doesn't it use a MicroUSB Connector?"
Probably because there are already two different small USB implementations, neither of which are on any standard-design PC. Sony desktop computers do not count. It's much more useful if you can plug it into a slot that *every* modern computer has, rather than having to carry an adapter around with you to use it.
"Why doesn't it use Bluetooth instead? For that capacity, the lack of speed ain't an issue."
Power/heat requirements, probably, and possibly due to a lack of widespread adoption of bluetooth on desktop equipment. If you have one that is bluetooth, you need to supply either a reliable way to turn it off, so its not constantly looking for computers to connect to, and you need to have a much better power source than a dime-battery. As with the previous comment about USB, if you can't find a computer that is aready equipped to handle the device, then there really isn't a point to having the device in the first place.
This all being said, it would have been nice if they would have used a different, thinner USB cable, even with that connector, and if they had hidden the connector inside the body of the watch so that it doesn't stand out like it does, but at least they built it in the first place. Hopefully they'll come out with some better ones now.
"Communication among non-cheating players is important. One incredible shot is skill. 10 incredible shots in a minute is a cheater."
When I was in high school, right as Quake came out, we played it every day in computer science class. No one was yet using the mouse, remembering the painful experience it was with DOOM, and I was reigning badass of the game. Sixteen of us on the map, and we'd quit when I hit 100 frags, and the next highest was 40 or 50, and the bulk of the people were down in the 20s or 30s. Granted, once people learned how to use the mouse, they kicked my ass and I've never reclaimed what I lost *sigh*, but it isn't always cheating. I knew that the weapon that I wanted was under the stairway, and that the armor I wanted was on the corner ledge, and to mind the spawnpoint in the tunnel behind it, and when to turn and run backwards shooting rockets down the hall that I had just left, etc. It pissed off the other players to no end when I would make use of what I knew, but I wasn't cheating. Rather, I had no life and the fastest processor in my home computer, so I was always playing.
Nothing says that it is illegal to have an alias in the United States, so long as one does not attempt to defraud or commit illegal acts with it. Sometimes words can border on illegal acts, if the court rules that something illegal has been said, like in the MPAA vs. 2600 Magazine situation, but here at least it is legal to use a pseudonym.
And one thing that would strongly help to deter this kind of legislation in the U.S. is a couple hundred years of authors using pseudonyms.
"...don't act like this wind tunnel was made to kill babies and burn villages..."
I'm fully aware of that. However, what were we doing sixty years ago? We were fighting the bloodiest war that the world has ever seen, that had more casualties than all other wars combined. That device was built to enable us to build materiel of war. It was to let "engineers" further the war effort. It's no shock that the "Army Corps of Engineers" are a group that are used in battle to complete necessary tasks, and have evolved from those who handled seige engines, bridges, and the like, all referred to as "engineers".
And as for the space race, our non-war with the Soviet Union was why we did that. If we were top-dog and felt that we were unthreatened in that, would we have sent people to the moon? I doubt it, myself. We aren't sending people anywhere right now, and we're barely maintaining any kind of permanent installation off of the surface at all. And why? Because we don't have anyone to have a pissing contest with.
I'm not trying to say that the world that created what we are now planning to shut off is bad. It came about long before I was born, and I cannot fully accurately judge what I did not witness or live through. However, advancement and change are often fuelled by competition, be it in the corporate world, the battlefield, or even among siblings. It would be nice to have a little bit of friendly competition, without large ballistic missiles carrying nukes pointed back and forth, but if there is nothing to maintain that competition, it makes sense to shut it down. It also makes sense to acknowledge where it comes from.
Yeah, I can see how people aren't happy about this. We lose something that can be used under short notice if they're mothballed. We reduce the number of jobs. However, I won't go so far as to call this bad. We aren't likely to forget the technology that goes into these systems, and we can always build them again. If they only mothball them, they might be able to be refurbished and opened again, similar to how the US Navy's Battleship fleet was brought back into service for a time. If they raze them, it won't be as easy, but it'll still be possible.
I'm just glad that the kind of world that built them isn't here. Not that widespread fear of terrorism, suspension of civil rights without public outcry, and widespread imperialism are good, but at least we're unlikely to see the kind of war that ravages an entire continent for a decade, or at least not ours.
Note: I wrote this at almost three in the morning, so if it's a bunch of crap, that's probably why.
Berating rules sticklers is stupid. Yes, it would be very annoying if everyone was a rules stickler, but at the same time, they provide us with people to demonstrate implementing ideals, versus just having them on paper. If one takes language, as an example, it would be terrible if everyone on the surface of the planet started typing papers 'l33t. We would quickly reach a point where we couldn't understand each other even in print. There is a reason why you hate that 2nd grade teacher; he or she forced you to learn how to use acceptable grammar.
Without people going to excesses of properness, we wouldn't have supportable ground to stand on for regular situations. People would neglect the "GNU" portions of "GNU/Linux" if it's not spelled out for them from time to time. I agree that it is stupid to say "GNU/" for every single thing that is covered under a form of the GPL, but this sanity check is probably just as important to the entire idea of Linux and free software as the coding sanity checks that the programmers who wrote the apps use. What would be the point in developing under GPL if the entire idea is simply forgotten?
This is the last death-throw of a company that has been rotting out for a very, very long time. Just keep your ducks in a row, and you'll probably be able to defend against them.
Their picking IBM as a target is probably the best thing that they could have done for the open source movement, since IBM will have the greatest chance of finding something to counter with that will seriously stick.
Having been the right school-age to had dealt with the first "PowerPC" Macintoshes, running System 7.5, this is a going to be a huge fiasco. The biggest problem that 7.5 had was that it was not running natively, the OS itself was being emulated. It sucked for performance. Yes, Apple did eventually get an all-PowerPC version out, with 8.0 or so, but at that point, it was geared toward the hardware of the time, which weren't 601's. School districts are still dealing with the effects of this screwup, and if they had simply built the OS in time to the hardware, this could have been averted.
And if you think that the commercial OS providers, all one of them that are mainstream, are going to have a version of their OS available to the general public for this machine, you're on something. They didn't even have support for more than 512 MB RAM in Windows Millennium, with a processor that can address 4GB.
It would be pretty cool if he were there because he's trying to get some experience for a future novel. It'd be especially funny, if comparing this work to Snow Crash, if he were going to have his character be a janitor in a space facility or somesuch, and like our infamous pizza driver, took on the closest weird job of custodial maintenance at this company to get a feel for what his character's life would be...
that are used in movies becoming the basis for Winamp plugins, or systems like in "The Matrix" becoming fairly accurate screen savers?
And there's the ever present commandline on a Macintosh, from Independence Day back in 1996 that spawned a whole generation of Apple-loving UNIX geeks, command line administerable Apples, and scorn from the Original (calling themselves True) Mac Geeks...
I've been running four 120GB drives in a RAID5 configuration at home for about six months now. It makes sense, since it's online storage, not offline, it's relatively fault-tolerant, and if I do lose a drive, I'll just shut the server down until I have replaced the drive, so to ensure that I don't lose more drives. I know that it'll have a higher change of catastrophic failure later, but it's not going to be any worse than tape's 20-30% fault rate, so I'll gladly live with it.
Besides, I'm the only one of my group of friends with 360GB fault tolerant storage online. It's good for geek-factor.
IBM did significant development of computer theory. They've probably contributed more than any other company combined. Granted, they have screwed up at times, and screwed up royally, but they don't appear to be running around smashing others with only lawyer-based divisions, a'la Rambus. They're also contributing back into something that I use on a daily basis as my primary computer platform, even when they didn't invent UNIX. Right now, IBM is a community player, and while that could change in theory at any moment, they're more my friend than this freak who is trying to demonstrate a patent on hypertext transfer protocol...
I'm sure that he'll manage to get royalties from the two or three million geeks running Apache at home.
Maybe we'll get lucky, and he'll pull a SCO, and try to sue IBM. I'm rather certain that IBM will find something that they have prior art on, or something that his patent depends on, that IBM can pull out and have fun with...
Re:A time of leaps and bounds
on
Secret Empire
·
· Score: 1
"Well, America went from piston powered prop planes in 1947. Great Britain and Germany already were ahead."
The United States also has had the largest air force in history, numbering something like 89,000 active aircraft, during World War II.
It might have been Joseph Stalin that said it, but the United States proved that "Quantity has a Quality all its own"...
U2..? High speed...?
on
Secret Empire
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
In all of the PBS documentaries that I've seen on the U2, I don't remember any of them calling it 'high speed'. In fact, I remember several references to fighters keeping up with it as it flew over the Soviet Union, but they weren't able to get up to the level it was flying at.
I thought that the U2 was built to simply out-altitude the opponent planes, and the downfall of the aircraft was when missile technology allowed them to shoot it down anyway...
"Okay, there I have to agree, but there isn't really anything as nice as Java for distributed, cross-platform work. Plus, it's possible that the server backend could be written in something else -- Java needs to be used for the UI, though."
Well, something else to keep in mind is that Sun's Java implementation sucks. Microsoft's Java implementation sucks. IBM's doesn't suck. Put IBM's client, IBM's central server, and IBM's suite together, and I'd be inclined to think that they've tested these pretty well together.
Regarding your points that were in rebuttal to the AC's comments about user preferences, where I work at, we don't have time to work with existing user preferences. It has been shown in every major computer overhaul we've had, the users' undying need for something suddenly evaporates as soon as the new functional system is implemented and they receive some mild training on it. For the longest time, the PCs were 80386 machines with bootroms on the ethernet cards to mount a Novell share to load a common version of Windows 3.1. They never would have left that except Microsoft, in their <sarcasm>infinite wisdom</sarcasm>, changed the way the OS worked so we couldn't do this anymore.
User preference is a myth. They'll deal with whatever comes along. They'll gripe for a few weeks, sure, but when it comes right down to it, it's the company/group/school districts' computers, not their computer, and if the organization has to make a computing change for legal purposes, or functionality purposes, or to keep technology up to date enough to meet new requirements, IS will make these changes.
But they should. Imagine if IBM does what IBM typically does well, which is deliver high-end computing in large-scale environments, with this product for users...
Large companies, school districts, government organizations, anywhere that has had computers longer than Microsoft has been in full force will be able to appreciate this. It's a support thing. If you can have a platform independent system that is centrally installed and highly available, you'll make it in evironments that have experience with IBM successes like AS/400's, System 370/390's, and RS/6000's, since these groups already trust IBM. In fact, companies that don't have IBM, because they purchased a cheaper competitor's computing platform, like an HP system or a Hitachi might be inclined to add this to their computing systems as well. They don't then have to go out to each PC when some dumbass library breaks, spending the significant amount of time necessary to fix Microsoft Office, they may have to go out and upgrade a web browser or java engine at the most. Then, they can do all of the product support and updates for the productivity suite in a localized area, and NOT have to pay Redmond the blood-money that they currently do for network-wide site licenses.
"First it was dumb terminals then network computers and now this. Its dead give it up."
Do you have ANY idea how useful something like this could be to large environments? Where I work, we have 35,000 computers on the supported list. Two or three different platforms worth, PCs, Macs, and some occasional Linux machines. It would be kick ass if we could deploy one version of one productivity suite across the whole network, especially if we could do it with site based central servers rather than having to work on each and every PC on the fucking network.
If this supports server-side file storage, it's even better, since then we don't have to worry about user data any longer. We'll gladly build fault-tolerant servers if we only have to do it for about a hundred machines, and suddenly we can also roll out upgrades to the products with only a few days' work, not months like we currently have to.
The days of dumb terminals rocked. If one broke, we brought another one out, and swapped. If the server broke, we dropped everything and fixed it. Regardless, the user wasn't without a connection or machine for days at a time like which happens in the Windows world. If Microsoft hadn't managed to con everyone into believing that their dumbass standalone workstation idea was the best, we'd probably be using X-Terms now, and have even better centralization of critical data, rather than every user having to know how to copy their data to the network attached storage (and most of them are not interested in learning).
Just because a computing model is old doesn't mean that it's outdated.
...and it's fairly pretty. I've been using Mozilla for quite a long time, mainly due to cross-platform compatibility, but this is definitely going to be worth looking into.
Though I can already see a couple of things that will cause problems. I'm running triple-head xinerama and gnome/sawfish, and when maximizing Opera, it fills one screen, but thinks that it has the realestate of all three, so stuff ends up being rendered off of the viewable area. I don't know if this is an Opera problem, a Gnome problem, or a Sawfish problem, but I won't be able to do much to fix it until I get around to installing a newer version of Gnome anyway. Hopefully this'll correct at that point.
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What if *gasp* They actually USE some of what they license, or do in SCO's eyes? Does that make it such that they have to continue to pay SCO's royalties from now until whenever they decide to be sued by SCO, if SCO were to somehow actually win against IBM/SuSE/RedHat/World?
As much as I want to see SCO stomped into the ground, I'll admit that if SCO wins, This would be a nice form of poetic justice...
Does the browser call a new java runtime layer, so it's a java layer running a web browser running a java layer, or does the original java layer detect the attempt to run Java and intercept to run it itself?
What happens if I run the java web browser in a web browser?
"Hey. Check out that funky moon!"
With apologies to "Amazon Women on the Moon"
"So what if there are multiple implementations? The vendor simply supplies a cable that goes from Mini-USB to standard USB B connector, like the 6-in-one card reader I bought last week (and returned because it wouldn't mount any media under Linux, but I digress)."
Ah, but there lies the problem. It's not like a laptop which generally will have a carry-bag with it, it's a wristwatch. The more extra parts, the worse it is for quick use, and the less likely it will be to be actually used. It'll also get negative reviews, from people having to carry around this stupid adapter in addition to a watch whose band is patent-pending rather than patent-leather, and would, in my opinion, not be worth buying.
"Why is the cable on the watach and not vice-versa?"
Probably because it would feel a lot worse to have a small plastic rounded watch band, and you would then also have to remove the watch to make use of it. If you're a contortionist, you don't have to now.
"Why doesn't it use a MicroUSB Connector?"
Probably because there are already two different small USB implementations, neither of which are on any standard-design PC. Sony desktop computers do not count. It's much more useful if you can plug it into a slot that *every* modern computer has, rather than having to carry an adapter around with you to use it.
"Why doesn't it use Bluetooth instead? For that capacity, the lack of speed ain't an issue."
Power/heat requirements, probably, and possibly due to a lack of widespread adoption of bluetooth on desktop equipment. If you have one that is bluetooth, you need to supply either a reliable way to turn it off, so its not constantly looking for computers to connect to, and you need to have a much better power source than a dime-battery. As with the previous comment about USB, if you can't find a computer that is aready equipped to handle the device, then there really isn't a point to having the device in the first place.
This all being said, it would have been nice if they would have used a different, thinner USB cable, even with that connector, and if they had hidden the connector inside the body of the watch so that it doesn't stand out like it does, but at least they built it in the first place. Hopefully they'll come out with some better ones now.
"Communication among non-cheating players is important. One incredible shot is skill. 10 incredible shots in a minute is a cheater."
When I was in high school, right as Quake came out, we played it every day in computer science class. No one was yet using the mouse, remembering the painful experience it was with DOOM, and I was reigning badass of the game. Sixteen of us on the map, and we'd quit when I hit 100 frags, and the next highest was 40 or 50, and the bulk of the people were down in the 20s or 30s. Granted, once people learned how to use the mouse, they kicked my ass and I've never reclaimed what I lost *sigh*, but it isn't always cheating. I knew that the weapon that I wanted was under the stairway, and that the armor I wanted was on the corner ledge, and to mind the spawnpoint in the tunnel behind it, and when to turn and run backwards shooting rockets down the hall that I had just left, etc. It pissed off the other players to no end when I would make use of what I knew, but I wasn't cheating. Rather, I had no life and the fastest processor in my home computer, so I was always playing.
Nothing says that it is illegal to have an alias in the United States, so long as one does not attempt to defraud or commit illegal acts with it. Sometimes words can border on illegal acts, if the court rules that something illegal has been said, like in the MPAA vs. 2600 Magazine situation, but here at least it is legal to use a pseudonym.
And one thing that would strongly help to deter this kind of legislation in the U.S. is a couple hundred years of authors using pseudonyms.
"...don't act like this wind tunnel was made to kill babies and burn villages..."
I'm fully aware of that. However, what were we doing sixty years ago? We were fighting the bloodiest war that the world has ever seen, that had more casualties than all other wars combined. That device was built to enable us to build materiel of war. It was to let "engineers" further the war effort. It's no shock that the "Army Corps of Engineers" are a group that are used in battle to complete necessary tasks, and have evolved from those who handled seige engines, bridges, and the like, all referred to as "engineers".
And as for the space race, our non-war with the Soviet Union was why we did that. If we were top-dog and felt that we were unthreatened in that, would we have sent people to the moon? I doubt it, myself. We aren't sending people anywhere right now, and we're barely maintaining any kind of permanent installation off of the surface at all. And why? Because we don't have anyone to have a pissing contest with.
I'm not trying to say that the world that created what we are now planning to shut off is bad. It came about long before I was born, and I cannot fully accurately judge what I did not witness or live through. However, advancement and change are often fuelled by competition, be it in the corporate world, the battlefield, or even among siblings. It would be nice to have a little bit of friendly competition, without large ballistic missiles carrying nukes pointed back and forth, but if there is nothing to maintain that competition, it makes sense to shut it down. It also makes sense to acknowledge where it comes from.
Yeah, I can see how people aren't happy about this. We lose something that can be used under short notice if they're mothballed. We reduce the number of jobs. However, I won't go so far as to call this bad. We aren't likely to forget the technology that goes into these systems, and we can always build them again. If they only mothball them, they might be able to be refurbished and opened again, similar to how the US Navy's Battleship fleet was brought back into service for a time. If they raze them, it won't be as easy, but it'll still be possible.
I'm just glad that the kind of world that built them isn't here. Not that widespread fear of terrorism, suspension of civil rights without public outcry, and widespread imperialism are good, but at least we're unlikely to see the kind of war that ravages an entire continent for a decade, or at least not ours.
Note: I wrote this at almost three in the morning, so if it's a bunch of crap, that's probably why.
Berating rules sticklers is stupid. Yes, it would be very annoying if everyone was a rules stickler, but at the same time, they provide us with people to demonstrate implementing ideals, versus just having them on paper. If one takes language, as an example, it would be terrible if everyone on the surface of the planet started typing papers 'l33t. We would quickly reach a point where we couldn't understand each other even in print. There is a reason why you hate that 2nd grade teacher; he or she forced you to learn how to use acceptable grammar.
Without people going to excesses of properness, we wouldn't have supportable ground to stand on for regular situations. People would neglect the "GNU" portions of "GNU/Linux" if it's not spelled out for them from time to time. I agree that it is stupid to say "GNU/" for every single thing that is covered under a form of the GPL, but this sanity check is probably just as important to the entire idea of Linux and free software as the coding sanity checks that the programmers who wrote the apps use. What would be the point in developing under GPL if the entire idea is simply forgotten?
This is the last death-throw of a company that has been rotting out for a very, very long time. Just keep your ducks in a row, and you'll probably be able to defend against them.
Their picking IBM as a target is probably the best thing that they could have done for the open source movement, since IBM will have the greatest chance of finding something to counter with that will seriously stick.
Having been the right school-age to had dealt with the first "PowerPC" Macintoshes, running System 7.5, this is a going to be a huge fiasco. The biggest problem that 7.5 had was that it was not running natively, the OS itself was being emulated. It sucked for performance. Yes, Apple did eventually get an all-PowerPC version out, with 8.0 or so, but at that point, it was geared toward the hardware of the time, which weren't 601's. School districts are still dealing with the effects of this screwup, and if they had simply built the OS in time to the hardware, this could have been averted.
And if you think that the commercial OS providers, all one of them that are mainstream, are going to have a version of their OS available to the general public for this machine, you're on something. They didn't even have support for more than 512 MB RAM in Windows Millennium, with a processor that can address 4GB.
It would be pretty cool if he were there because he's trying to get some experience for a future novel. It'd be especially funny, if comparing this work to Snow Crash, if he were going to have his character be a janitor in a space facility or somesuch, and like our infamous pizza driver, took on the closest weird job of custodial maintenance at this company to get a feel for what his character's life would be...
that are used in movies becoming the basis for Winamp plugins, or systems like in "The Matrix" becoming fairly accurate screen savers?
And there's the ever present commandline on a Macintosh, from Independence Day back in 1996 that spawned a whole generation of Apple-loving UNIX geeks, command line administerable Apples, and scorn from the Original (calling themselves True) Mac Geeks...
I've been running four 120GB drives in a RAID5 configuration at home for about six months now. It makes sense, since it's online storage, not offline, it's relatively fault-tolerant, and if I do lose a drive, I'll just shut the server down until I have replaced the drive, so to ensure that I don't lose more drives. I know that it'll have a higher change of catastrophic failure later, but it's not going to be any worse than tape's 20-30% fault rate, so I'll gladly live with it.
Besides, I'm the only one of my group of friends with 360GB fault tolerant storage online. It's good for geek-factor.
I look at it this way...
IBM did significant development of computer theory. They've probably contributed more than any other company combined. Granted, they have screwed up at times, and screwed up royally, but they don't appear to be running around smashing others with only lawyer-based divisions, a'la Rambus. They're also contributing back into something that I use on a daily basis as my primary computer platform, even when they didn't invent UNIX. Right now, IBM is a community player, and while that could change in theory at any moment, they're more my friend than this freak who is trying to demonstrate a patent on hypertext transfer protocol...
I'm sure that he'll manage to get royalties from the two or three million geeks running Apache at home.
Maybe we'll get lucky, and he'll pull a SCO, and try to sue IBM. I'm rather certain that IBM will find something that they have prior art on, or something that his patent depends on, that IBM can pull out and have fun with...
"Well, America went from piston powered prop planes in 1947. Great Britain and Germany already were ahead."
The United States also has had the largest air force in history, numbering something like 89,000 active aircraft, during World War II.
It might have been Joseph Stalin that said it, but the United States proved that "Quantity has a Quality all its own"...
In all of the PBS documentaries that I've seen on the U2, I don't remember any of them calling it 'high speed'. In fact, I remember several references to fighters keeping up with it as it flew over the Soviet Union, but they weren't able to get up to the level it was flying at.
I thought that the U2 was built to simply out-altitude the opponent planes, and the downfall of the aircraft was when missile technology allowed them to shoot it down anyway...
"Okay, there I have to agree, but there isn't really anything as nice as Java for distributed, cross-platform work. Plus, it's possible that the server backend could be written in something else -- Java needs to be used for the UI, though."
Well, something else to keep in mind is that Sun's Java implementation sucks. Microsoft's Java implementation sucks. IBM's doesn't suck. Put IBM's client, IBM's central server, and IBM's suite together, and I'd be inclined to think that they've tested these pretty well together.
Regarding your points that were in rebuttal to the AC's comments about user preferences, where I work at, we don't have time to work with existing user preferences. It has been shown in every major computer overhaul we've had, the users' undying need for something suddenly evaporates as soon as the new functional system is implemented and they receive some mild training on it. For the longest time, the PCs were 80386 machines with bootroms on the ethernet cards to mount a Novell share to load a common version of Windows 3.1. They never would have left that except Microsoft, in their <sarcasm>infinite wisdom</sarcasm>, changed the way the OS worked so we couldn't do this anymore.
User preference is a myth. They'll deal with whatever comes along. They'll gripe for a few weeks, sure, but when it comes right down to it, it's the company/group/school districts' computers, not their computer, and if the organization has to make a computing change for legal purposes, or functionality purposes, or to keep technology up to date enough to meet new requirements, IS will make these changes.
"Microsoft doesnt care."
But they should. Imagine if IBM does what IBM typically does well, which is deliver high-end computing in large-scale environments, with this product for users...
Large companies, school districts, government organizations, anywhere that has had computers longer than Microsoft has been in full force will be able to appreciate this. It's a support thing. If you can have a platform independent system that is centrally installed and highly available, you'll make it in evironments that have experience with IBM successes like AS/400's, System 370/390's, and RS/6000's, since these groups already trust IBM. In fact, companies that don't have IBM, because they purchased a cheaper competitor's computing platform, like an HP system or a Hitachi might be inclined to add this to their computing systems as well. They don't then have to go out to each PC when some dumbass library breaks, spending the significant amount of time necessary to fix Microsoft Office, they may have to go out and upgrade a web browser or java engine at the most. Then, they can do all of the product support and updates for the productivity suite in a localized area, and NOT have to pay Redmond the blood-money that they currently do for network-wide site licenses.
I'd SO go for it...
"First it was dumb terminals then network computers and now this. Its dead give it up."
Do you have ANY idea how useful something like this could be to large environments? Where I work, we have 35,000 computers on the supported list. Two or three different platforms worth, PCs, Macs, and some occasional Linux machines. It would be kick ass if we could deploy one version of one productivity suite across the whole network, especially if we could do it with site based central servers rather than having to work on each and every PC on the fucking network.
If this supports server-side file storage, it's even better, since then we don't have to worry about user data any longer. We'll gladly build fault-tolerant servers if we only have to do it for about a hundred machines, and suddenly we can also roll out upgrades to the products with only a few days' work, not months like we currently have to.
The days of dumb terminals rocked. If one broke, we brought another one out, and swapped. If the server broke, we dropped everything and fixed it. Regardless, the user wasn't without a connection or machine for days at a time like which happens in the Windows world. If Microsoft hadn't managed to con everyone into believing that their dumbass standalone workstation idea was the best, we'd probably be using X-Terms now, and have even better centralization of critical data, rather than every user having to know how to copy their data to the network attached storage (and most of them are not interested in learning).
Just because a computing model is old doesn't mean that it's outdated.
...and it's fairly pretty. I've been using Mozilla for quite a long time, mainly due to cross-platform compatibility, but this is definitely going to be worth looking into.
Though I can already see a couple of things that will cause problems. I'm running triple-head xinerama and gnome/sawfish, and when maximizing Opera, it fills one screen, but thinks that it has the realestate of all three, so stuff ends up being rendered off of the viewable area. I don't know if this is an Opera problem, a Gnome problem, or a Sawfish problem, but I won't be able to do much to fix it until I get around to installing a newer version of Gnome anyway. Hopefully this'll correct at that point.
Definitely pretty though.