By law, public companies are required to consider "every legitimate offer". In fact, they are required to consider "every offer", whether it's legitimate or not.
What will be more interesting that what Comcast or Disney do is what the FCC does. The FCC and FTC both should scuttle this deal because when you marry one of the largest cable companies with one of the largest content producers, what you have is a monopoly. Comcast is trying to out-Time Warner, Time Warner.
The deal is bad for competition, bad for freedom of the press, bad for Disney, and worst of all, bad for shareholders. So who's getting rich off this offer (right now)?
But another business model will. Programming on demand, a space that TIVO can plan in, but it may be superceded by Comcast and the current cable providers.
As I've said before, I believe that on-demand programming with digital rights management supplied by a central player (such as Time Warner, Microsoft or others) will be the dominant model.
TIVO is simply a bridging technology to on-demand.
In 10-15 years, we'll still be paying $40/month (2003 dollars) to get X-hours of TV per month; except they will be ad-free hours, and they'll be on-demand hours. Comcast/TimeWarner will be the distributor....Microsoft the technology provider.
this job posting is, think about it from Kelly's viewpoint. They are competing with foreign workers for help desk support; their tech outsourcing is under siege. If someone's willing to fill this position, even for a month, they've made some money. Kelly is a transactional business; not a brain-farm (like BearingPoint or Accenture).
Tech workers are whining about what hard labor workers had to endure with NAFTA. Remember Perot's "Giant Sucking Sound" -- well now, thanks to the Internet and armagedden in the telco market, you now have that sucking sound from Asia.
Want better tech jobs? Create them! You've got to build something more than yet another XML Web Service for B2B leveraging of core compentencies in the new millenium...if you know what I mean.
ISP flat rates (DSL, Cable) will trend towards capped bandwidth because of P2P multimedia. The exception will be if you use the ISP's DRM system, and give them a per-click charge. DSL providers will have to get deeper into the DRM business, or they won't survive. Teleco services trends towards zero, so only up-selling will save them.
* When you purchase an on-demand movie from your ISP (cable company), it may be served up from your next-door neighbor's house off their same-manufactured box.
* When the movie is served up, it is encrypted with a proprietary DRM model that is specific to that ISP and their settop box of choice.
* When you use that ISP-specific P2P/DRM, your bandwidth costs are built into the movie charge.
* When you use Kazaa on the other hand, to download ILLEGAL, COPYRIGHTED, and UNPROTECTED works, your bandwidth costs, and your rights to privacy may be thwarted.
* Also, if you use TIVO to pass DRM-ed movies across an ISP's wires, you will have to pay extra for bandwidth.
DRM-less, open-source-based, media distribution is a fringe. The vast majority of consumers will not have a Linux-equipped white box hooked up to their home theatre; they don't have the technical knowledge to do so.
Consumers will continue to buy their set top boxes (which will be P2P nodes) from the cable/sat providers, or from TIVO. In most of those cases, the boxes will be running on a media-industry approved OS and DRM platform provided by either Microsoft, Sony, or maybe Scientific Atlanta (or whatever their name is, and even they may be relegated to hardware running a MS OS).
Sun has neither the vision nor the marketing savvy to win in this game with a Java-based box.
I'd also say that, even if someone does sell a box based on Linux, it will be a closed system with heavy DRM built in, so the fact that it's running Linux is only to get rid of the Microsoft tax.
If you want a Linux machine that has the form factor and features of an XBOX, then spend your time building a Linux-based XBOX competitor. Spending your life fighting Microsoft is a waste of your skills and your life in general. Hell, I feel guilty sending this e-mail.
GET A CLUE: THE BEST WAY TO BEAT MICROSOFT IS TO PLAY YOUR OWN GAME, NOT THEIRS! You will never make Microsoft your bitch, get over it.
P2P for media distribution has been around since the very beginning of radio and television. It's called the "affiliate" model. P2P networks based on "affiliate" nodes (not unlike Kazaa supernodes) have been around for several years, and are likely to have a prominent place.
The client/server model is inefficient for media distribution. Trusting consumer nodes for distribution is relatively insecure, but more importantly, consumers won't want to pay the bandwidth fees that ISPs will likely charge if consumer nodes go critical mass (I would argue that--even with Kazaa out there--critical mass has not yet been achieved).
Prediction: Microsoft will be on the settop, and the dominant P2P media distribution network will be through proprietary, DRM-managed, Microsoft-run networks. Microsoft WILL NOT LOSE in this game -- they are betting the company on it. Their trojan horse is XBOX.
Every line of.NET framework code (J#/C#/VB.NET) is a line that didn't get written in Java. From that perspective, Mono and DotGNU help Microsoft to expand the market for.NET.
What is the revenue model for.NET though? Microsoft charges only for the development environment, which you can purchase from Borland if you like. The real strategy is to keep people focused on the Windows platform..NET's value to Micrososft is to make Windows developers more productive.
Bottom line: Microsoft will likely allow Mono (as they have so far) and DotGNU until applications utilizing it on Linux reach critical mass. At that point, Microosft will probably start charging royalties to commercial developers (either per programmer, or rev share).
Will Microsoft forbid.NET on Linux? Maybe for a short time this could happen, and it is a danger, but I just wonder if they'll dare pull such a stunt given the EU/US anti-trust watchdogs. The only reason they would do it is to try and slow down the march towards Linux, which, frankly, will not be affected by the presence of.NET on that platform.
Devil's Advocate note: I also wonder if they'll try to stop it now because if they let it go for too long without challenging it, the courts might say they didn't defend it for so long that they lost their chance (but I'm not a lawyer).
Finally: Why use.NET at all on Linux (note that I LOVE.NET on Windows)? The whole point of writing distributed applications with Web services is so that platforms can communicate over SOAP (or SOAP-ey) protocols. I don't see any major advantage of.NET over J2EE for an enterprise dedicated to Linux.
I agree that Dell's response was patently stupid, but if you're going to install Linux, why are you buying hardware that you KNOW comes with the Microsoft tax. For the level of support you're going to get on Linux from Dell, you'd be better off buying a generic laptop with no tax.
THAT SAID: Send your account of the experience to Dell's corporate counsel, and I be some heads will roll.
If you want to work at Microsoft Research or at the very top of your field doing truly NEW security work, get a PhD.
If you want to be a heads-down enteprrise software programmer building the very latest Java edition of that old VB/COBOL application, then a PhD is definitely a liability.
The assumption is that a PhD is interested in new research, and so yes, it limits you because as a hiring manager, I don't want you running off to teach Discrete Math at the local university because you're bored with 10 hour VB.NET / Java Programming days.
Even a Masters puts you in that category to a certain degree.
It's called "Global Warming"; check it out. It's called Super Virus. It's called water pollution. Genetically altered foods.
True, it probably won't affect you; judging by your comments, you're probably a Republican, and all the Republicans will be sipping hydroponic wine in their underground bunker.
I've heard that over half the people that ever lived are alive today. That would mean we're doubling the Earth's population every 70 years or so. We are facing a disaster with the current population -- I can't imagine what will happen with 12 billion people alive.
Though I'm healthy, and therefore can afford to think about this in the abstract, I think that after you're about 60 years old, you shouldn't be thinking about heart/lung/kidney transplants and other heroic measures.
A relatively small percentage of Oracle installations ran on Windows NT anyway. I don't doubt that moving to Linux workstations will save Oracle some money, but the point is: who cares? Oracle will compete/win only by having the fastest, lowest TCO, highest ROI database servers and applications, whether they use Windows or Linux, and whether they develop in.NET or Java.
I've always thought that people should pick the application first, the middle-tier(DB) second, and the OS last. Selling a Windows 2003 server to run a great application is a lot easier than selling a crappy application than runs on Linux!
Initiatives like this crack me up. Sun, Oracle and Lotus are obsessed with making Microsoft look bad. It's like the middle-class kids egging the rich kid's Beamer at night, only to return to their '82 Tercel for the rest of school year.
Competition in software comes from innovation, not religion. Why would customers give one damn what platform the developers use?? Answer: They don't.
Find out who and how the company was shut down. If you can't find anyone who took control of the assets, send letters to the contact person on the corporate papers (you can look this up on the Web in most states). Give them 90 days to respond, and if they don't, indicate that you consider the code to be in the public domain, and that you will be building derivative works.
NOTE: I'm not a lawyer, but I bet some form of what I'm saying would ring true with a lawyer.
I worked for a Dot Com that folded. They sent the "assets", including $1.5M of Indian-outsourced code to a holding company that executed the shutdown of the company. The holding company then auctioned the code off to another software company for an insanely low price (something like $100K probably -- not that the market value of it exceeded $10K).
Now it sits on the shelf of another floundering software company, unsold and unused.
Hmmmm...there seems to be a lot of misunderstanding of what I'm saying. I think, in a vacuum, Linux is a fine desktop operating system. But we don't live in a vacuum, we live in a world where corporate IT standardizes on a single platform, and that platform has to support application choice and interopability with customers, suppliers and partners.
The result is: If my workstation can't open a complex Word or Excel document, edit it, and send it back with perfect rendering, I've got a problem.
I won't claim to be an expert, but I believe the Windows 2000/XP desktop to be far more supportable in a large IT environment than Linux.
The number of "end-users" with the skills, permission and motivation to install Linux on their work desktop is extremely low. I don't doubt the trend, but I do doubt that it would have any significant effect on desktop penetration.
The Linux crowd cracks me up. Yes, Linux is important on the server. Yes, it poses a threat to Windows 2003. But let's not forget that Windows took a full 10 years from 1.0 until 95 when it really busted out on the desktop and took over DOS once and for all. The Linux desktop hasn't even started down that path in my opinion, except with hobbyists, UNIX-bigots and a few European workers that are finally glad they have a PC.
When Open Office can read and write MS Word/Excel files with absolutely no damage to the file or the rendering, then I'd think Microsoft needs to start worrying. Until then, it's just a hobby.
Assuming you've got a quiet keyboard, it's definitely progress. Especially if the chat were shared with the lecturer afterwards as feedback.
If you're passing love notes via chat, that would be rude (but fun!).
I'm on a mission to piss all Slashdot readers off:
1. The XBOX ISN'T just hardware. It's software too. It's a free world, if you don't like MS policies about hacking XBOX, don't buy one.
2. If you're good with a soldering iron and you want a cheap Linux box, then you're probably smart enough to buy cheap parts at ComputerGeeks.com and build one yourself.
3. GET A FRIGGIN' LIFE!!! WHO THE F. CARES IF XBOX RUNS LINUX! Put your efforts into something useful for a change! You're all smart folks -- figure out a way to stop terrorism, or at least stop John Ashcroft!
If you hate MS that much, put your efforts into the Open Source.NET project, now THAT's a useful pursuit.
Does anyone believe that C#/Java will improve the overall quality, standardization and total cost of ownership of enterprise software? Or is the improvement only incremental?
My theory has two parts:
1. Strongly typed, managed code environments will eliminate many of the problems created under older C++/VB/COBOL programs.
2. The scope of the runtime environment, which now includes XML "web-services" and other high-level constructs will help to eliminate integration problems that called for customization in the past.
I've always felt that enterprise software vendors could make their biggest improvement in sales by reducing the overall implementation costs and leaving the core features alone.
Devise a language consisting only of the digits 0 - 9 plus pound and asterisk for punctuation. Sounds like a good project for the Trekkies that dress like Klingons. Or Noam Chomsky maybe.
[Boy, have I just offended like at least 25% of the slashdot readership, or what?]
Slashdot Mirror
This theory is being debunked wholesale. Faulty research based on false data.
Original researcher is fuming mad about it too!
By law, public companies are required to consider "every legitimate offer". In fact, they are required to consider "every offer", whether it's legitimate or not.
What will be more interesting that what Comcast or Disney do is what the FCC does. The FCC and FTC both should scuttle this deal because when you marry one of the largest cable companies with one of the largest content producers, what you have is a monopoly. Comcast is trying to out-Time Warner, Time Warner.
The deal is bad for competition, bad for freedom of the press, bad for Disney, and worst of all, bad for shareholders. So who's getting rich off this offer (right now)?
But another business model will. Programming on demand, a space that TIVO can plan in, but it may be superceded by Comcast and the current cable providers.
As I've said before, I believe that on-demand programming with digital rights management supplied by a central player (such as Time Warner, Microsoft or others) will be the dominant model.
TIVO is simply a bridging technology to on-demand.
In 10-15 years, we'll still be paying $40/month (2003 dollars) to get X-hours of TV per month; except they will be ad-free hours, and they'll be on-demand hours. Comcast/TimeWarner will be the distributor....Microsoft the technology provider.
this job posting is, think about it from Kelly's viewpoint. They are competing with foreign workers for help desk support; their tech outsourcing is under siege. If someone's willing to fill this position, even for a month, they've made some money. Kelly is a transactional business; not a brain-farm (like BearingPoint or Accenture).
Tech workers are whining about what hard labor workers had to endure with NAFTA. Remember Perot's "Giant Sucking Sound" -- well now, thanks to the Internet and armagedden in the telco market, you now have that sucking sound from Asia.
Want better tech jobs? Create them! You've got to build something more than yet another XML Web Service for B2B leveraging of core compentencies in the new millenium...if you know what I mean.
ISP flat rates (DSL, Cable) will trend towards capped bandwidth because of P2P multimedia. The exception will be if you use the ISP's DRM system, and give them a per-click charge. DSL providers will have to get deeper into the DRM business, or they won't survive. Teleco services trends towards zero, so only up-selling will save them.
Just FYI: I can barely keep MSN Messenger connected for five minutes at a time. HOWEVER, Trillian Pro stays connected very reliably to MSN.
What I'm saying is this:
* When you purchase an on-demand movie from your ISP (cable company), it may be served up from your next-door neighbor's house off their same-manufactured box.
* When the movie is served up, it is encrypted with a proprietary DRM model that is specific to that ISP and their settop box of choice.
* When you use that ISP-specific P2P/DRM, your bandwidth costs are built into the movie charge.
* When you use Kazaa on the other hand, to download ILLEGAL, COPYRIGHTED, and UNPROTECTED works, your bandwidth costs, and your rights to privacy may be thwarted.
* Also, if you use TIVO to pass DRM-ed movies across an ISP's wires, you will have to pay extra for bandwidth.
DRM-less, open-source-based, media distribution is a fringe. The vast majority of consumers will not have a Linux-equipped white box hooked up to their home theatre; they don't have the technical knowledge to do so.
Consumers will continue to buy their set top boxes (which will be P2P nodes) from the cable/sat providers, or from TIVO. In most of those cases, the boxes will be running on a media-industry approved OS and DRM platform provided by either Microsoft, Sony, or maybe Scientific Atlanta (or whatever their name is, and even they may be relegated to hardware running a MS OS).
Sun has neither the vision nor the marketing savvy to win in this game with a Java-based box.
I'd also say that, even if someone does sell a box based on Linux, it will be a closed system with heavy DRM built in, so the fact that it's running Linux is only to get rid of the Microsoft tax.
If you want a Linux machine that has the form factor and features of an XBOX, then spend your time building a Linux-based XBOX competitor. Spending your life fighting Microsoft is a waste of your skills and your life in general. Hell, I feel guilty sending this e-mail.
GET A CLUE: THE BEST WAY TO BEAT MICROSOFT IS TO PLAY YOUR OWN GAME, NOT THEIRS! You will never make Microsoft your bitch, get over it.
P2P for media distribution has been around since the very beginning of radio and television. It's called the "affiliate" model. P2P networks based on "affiliate" nodes (not unlike Kazaa supernodes) have been around for several years, and are likely to have a prominent place.
The client/server model is inefficient for media distribution. Trusting consumer nodes for distribution is relatively insecure, but more importantly, consumers won't want to pay the bandwidth fees that ISPs will likely charge if consumer nodes go critical mass (I would argue that--even with Kazaa out there--critical mass has not yet been achieved).
Prediction: Microsoft will be on the settop, and the dominant P2P media distribution network will be through proprietary, DRM-managed, Microsoft-run networks. Microsoft WILL NOT LOSE in this game -- they are betting the company on it. Their trojan horse is XBOX.
Every line of .NET framework code (J#/C#/VB.NET) is a line that didn't get written in Java. From that perspective, Mono and DotGNU help Microsoft to expand the market for .NET.
.NET though? Microsoft charges only for the development environment, which you can purchase from Borland if you like. The real strategy is to keep people focused on the Windows platform. .NET's value to Micrososft is to make Windows developers more productive.
.NET on Linux? Maybe for a short time this could happen, and it is a danger, but I just wonder if they'll dare pull such a stunt given the EU/US anti-trust watchdogs. The only reason they would do it is to try and slow down the march towards Linux, which, frankly, will not be affected by the presence of .NET on that platform.
.NET at all on Linux (note that I LOVE .NET on Windows)? The whole point of writing distributed applications with Web services is so that platforms can communicate over SOAP (or SOAP-ey) protocols. I don't see any major advantage of .NET over J2EE for an enterprise dedicated to Linux.
What is the revenue model for
Bottom line: Microsoft will likely allow Mono (as they have so far) and DotGNU until applications utilizing it on Linux reach critical mass. At that point, Microosft will probably start charging royalties to commercial developers (either per programmer, or rev share).
Will Microsoft forbid
Devil's Advocate note: I also wonder if they'll try to stop it now because if they let it go for too long without challenging it, the courts might say they didn't defend it for so long that they lost their chance (but I'm not a lawyer).
Finally: Why use
I agree that Dell's response was patently stupid, but if you're going to install Linux, why are you buying hardware that you KNOW comes with the Microsoft tax. For the level of support you're going to get on Linux from Dell, you'd be better off buying a generic laptop with no tax.
THAT SAID: Send your account of the experience to Dell's corporate counsel, and I be some heads will roll.
If you want to work at Microsoft Research or at the very top of your field doing truly NEW security work, get a PhD.
If you want to be a heads-down enteprrise software programmer building the very latest Java edition of that old VB/COBOL application, then a PhD is definitely a liability.
The assumption is that a PhD is interested in new research, and so yes, it limits you because as a hiring manager, I don't want you running off to teach Discrete Math at the local university because you're bored with 10 hour VB.NET / Java Programming days.
Even a Masters puts you in that category to a certain degree.
It's called "Global Warming"; check it out. It's called Super Virus. It's called water pollution. Genetically altered foods.
True, it probably won't affect you; judging by your comments, you're probably a Republican, and all the Republicans will be sipping hydroponic wine in their underground bunker.
I've heard that over half the people that ever lived are alive today. That would mean we're doubling the Earth's population every 70 years or so. We are facing a disaster with the current population -- I can't imagine what will happen with 12 billion people alive.
Though I'm healthy, and therefore can afford to think about this in the abstract, I think that after you're about 60 years old, you shouldn't be thinking about heart/lung/kidney transplants and other heroic measures.
A relatively small percentage of Oracle installations ran on Windows NT anyway. I don't doubt that moving to Linux workstations will save Oracle some money, but the point is: who cares? Oracle will compete/win only by having the fastest, lowest TCO, highest ROI database servers and applications, whether they use Windows or Linux, and whether they develop in .NET or Java.
I've always thought that people should pick the application first, the middle-tier(DB) second, and the OS last. Selling a Windows 2003 server to run a great application is a lot easier than selling a crappy application than runs on Linux!
Initiatives like this crack me up. Sun, Oracle and Lotus are obsessed with making Microsoft look bad. It's like the middle-class kids egging the rich kid's Beamer at night, only to return to their '82 Tercel for the rest of school year.
Competition in software comes from innovation, not religion. Why would customers give one damn what platform the developers use?? Answer: They don't.
Find out who and how the company was shut down. If you can't find anyone who took control of the assets, send letters to the contact person on the corporate papers (you can look this up on the Web in most states). Give them 90 days to respond, and if they don't, indicate that you consider the code to be in the public domain, and that you will be building derivative works.
NOTE: I'm not a lawyer, but I bet some form of what I'm saying would ring true with a lawyer.
I worked for a Dot Com that folded. They sent the "assets", including $1.5M of Indian-outsourced code to a holding company that executed the shutdown of the company. The holding company then auctioned the code off to another software company for an insanely low price (something like $100K probably -- not that the market value of it exceeded $10K).
Now it sits on the shelf of another floundering software company, unsold and unused.
Hmmmm...there seems to be a lot of misunderstanding of what I'm saying. I think, in a vacuum, Linux is a fine desktop operating system. But we don't live in a vacuum, we live in a world where corporate IT standardizes on a single platform, and that platform has to support application choice and interopability with customers, suppliers and partners.
The result is: If my workstation can't open a complex Word or Excel document, edit it, and send it back with perfect rendering, I've got a problem.
I won't claim to be an expert, but I believe the Windows 2000/XP desktop to be far more supportable in a large IT environment than Linux.
The number of "end-users" with the skills, permission and motivation to install Linux on their work desktop is extremely low. I don't doubt the trend, but I do doubt that it would have any significant effect on desktop penetration.
The Linux crowd cracks me up. Yes, Linux is important on the server. Yes, it poses a threat to Windows 2003. But let's not forget that Windows took a full 10 years from 1.0 until 95 when it really busted out on the desktop and took over DOS once and for all. The Linux desktop hasn't even started down that path in my opinion, except with hobbyists, UNIX-bigots and a few European workers that are finally glad they have a PC.
When Open Office can read and write MS Word/Excel files with absolutely no damage to the file or the rendering, then I'd think Microsoft needs to start worrying. Until then, it's just a hobby.
Assuming you've got a quiet keyboard, it's definitely progress. Especially if the chat were shared with the lecturer afterwards as feedback. If you're passing love notes via chat, that would be rude (but fun!).
It's not like they actually sell it anymore. (j/k)
I'm on a mission to piss all Slashdot readers off:
.NET project, now THAT's a useful pursuit.
1. The XBOX ISN'T just hardware. It's software too. It's a free world, if you don't like MS policies about hacking XBOX, don't buy one.
2. If you're good with a soldering iron and you want a cheap Linux box, then you're probably smart enough to buy cheap parts at ComputerGeeks.com and build one yourself.
3. GET A FRIGGIN' LIFE!!! WHO THE F. CARES IF XBOX RUNS LINUX! Put your efforts into something useful for a change! You're all smart folks -- figure out a way to stop terrorism, or at least stop John Ashcroft!
If you hate MS that much, put your efforts into the Open Source
Does anyone believe that C#/Java will improve the overall quality, standardization and total cost of ownership of enterprise software? Or is the improvement only incremental? My theory has two parts: 1. Strongly typed, managed code environments will eliminate many of the problems created under older C++/VB/COBOL programs. 2. The scope of the runtime environment, which now includes XML "web-services" and other high-level constructs will help to eliminate integration problems that called for customization in the past. I've always felt that enterprise software vendors could make their biggest improvement in sales by reducing the overall implementation costs and leaving the core features alone.
Devise a language consisting only of the digits 0 - 9 plus pound and asterisk for punctuation. Sounds like a good project for the Trekkies that dress like Klingons. Or Noam Chomsky maybe. [Boy, have I just offended like at least 25% of the slashdot readership, or what?]