Yes, my experience exactly! My VBScript kernel runs perfectly on a cluster of Windows 98 boxes, which are so stable that I'm using them as a support for the desk.
Linux is obviously a sham, written by weekend hackers, and frankly I'm surprised that the Apache team dared to steal the Microsoft-developed HTTP protocol for their IIS-alike so-called "web server".... HEY!
Businesses only respect those parties who fight and win. The FSF must defend the GPL, it is not about sappy-minded communism but about assuring the free flow of information and ideas needed to sustain a technological revolution.
A revolution, one might add, on which the fortunes of many large companies depend today. The FSF has indirectly added more dollars to the value of the companies that Forbes speaks to than any other single group in the last 20 years.
This article sounds suspiciously like it's been sponsored by someone who wants to hit at the GPL: rather than looking at the quite astonishing savings that people make by using Linux (for free) in their products, they highlight the somewhat "annoying" fact that there is actually a payback for those free goodies, and the GPL is the guarantor of that payback.
Forbes should really be better informed: it's a free market and everyone has the right to write their own commercial software instead of profiting from the work of others and then complaining when the well-established conditions are enforced.
As for Cisco buying a company that had relied on Linux for their key product? Stupid, maybe. But that surely is their problem, not the fault of the FSF.
As an author of many GPL'd products, I'd certainly pay the FSF to enforce my rights. Go for it, hit men!!!
The article is pretty silly but it reflects a general mindset. "Oooh, Microsoft, ooooh, big bad bully!!"
Yes, but even big bad bullies tend to look after their own interests.
It's very hard to imagine hoards of Linux developers jumping onto Mono. Very hard. After all, if the word "individualistic" applied to anything, it'd be Open Source developers.
But imagine another, much more plausible scenario, for an instant in which Linux is incredibly successful, so much that Microsoft realize that Windows, as a proprietary OS, is not going to ever make money again. We're pretty close to that point today.
Now, Microsoft have this huge suite of applications that they want people to use and pay for. But no-one is installing the latest Windows, instead they're taking the cheap and cheerful route and doing with less complex applications, or getting their own made in LAMP.
LAMP... suddenly Microsoft realize that there _is_ a Visual Basic for Linux, and it's doing what VB did on Windows: creating a generation of developers able to get the OS deployed for small-medium business, the core Windows market... OOOPS!
Now, Microsoft suddenly see Mono in a very, very different light. It's their safety-net. If they can port their.NET applications to Linux, they can sell them. Wow! Suddenly there is a whole new market of people to buy new Office licenses (oops, did you not read the fine print where it says your old Windows licenses aren't transferrable? Too bad...)
Microsoft sell software. That they have depended on Windows to control their market might have worked in the past, but that strategy seems finished.
If they're smart, they are using Mono as an insurance policy which - should Linus die one day in an unfortunate accident - they can also strangle with IP laws.
Either way, I thought Mono was a bad idea when it started, and I still think it's a bad idea. In the best case it's divisive, and in the worst case it is a breachhead for Microsoft to launch its junk on the corporate Linux market.
Uhm, maybe, but the differences are still not extreme. We (my company) buy SCSI drives not because they're faster but because they tend to be better engineered and last longer.
My idea about segmentation is a 20x difference in speed and capacity. E.g:
- 1 50Gb drive operating at 20,000 RPM
- a 1TB drive operating at 1,000 RPM.
Or something. To the point where everyone has one drive of the first kind, and one of the second in their machines.
Nice little ditty, I will play this all day tomorrow and drive my co-workers totally crazy, they will be dancing around singing "do the Lindows' Rock"...
Ahl ah need is some o dem dreds, mahn! totally cool, lindows!
Actually, I think the business traveller is one of the few people who is assured access to Wifi or other broadband on demand: in airports, hotels, and company locations.
Internal phone systems? People still call from desk to desk instead of sending an email? I'm impressed.
Anyhow, my "business case" is not that, but an argument against VoIP actually becoming a big thing quickly.
And another argument against it: the ink cartridge factor: most people will not pay the up-front costs just to get cheaper calls. They will prefer their existing mobile phones even if it turns out more expensive in the long run.
OTOH, it seems that VoIP will probably happen anyhow, but it'll happen under cover of existing mobile networks, basically a migration of GSM to an IP-based protocol, and possibly a push by mobile operators into the fixed market by offering IP compatability.
Frankly, these guys have a poor reputation: they make a product that is designed to aid breaches of copyright, they use their network to install spyware and possibly worse on their users' computers...
It's hard enough to keep a clean rep (look at Google), but frankly I'd think twice before installing anything with the label "Made by the Guys who Brought You Kazaa!".
Despite that, VoIP still has one problem: voice is simply less flexible useful than text messaging, for most people.
IMHO, voice is only useful when I'm away from my desk, and this will only work when VoIP marries Wifi, and since widespread Wifi is still going to be a pipedream for at least a year or two, there sits VoIP.
I predict the next generation of small mobile VoIP handsets will be extremely popular with business travellers, and pretty much ignored by the general population.
Having possibly learnt this trick from Microsoft. XSF is, whatever else might be defined in the original contract with AT&T, a work produced by SGI. Now, if I license a product from a company, and distribute my own works with that product, I would be quite angry if I was told those works were "derivative".
Yet this seems to be what SCO are arguing. The original SYS V license was, it appears, so powerful that its mere presence on a disk would turn all other software into Unix source code!
It is amusing when you consider the hate focussed onto the GPL for applying a much milder form of a "viral license", namely that true derived works are permitted under certain conditions.
Medium-to-large businesses do not generally create or invent business strategies, what they do is to take existing strategies, and refine them slowly and carefully. The biggest reason for doing something is that "it worked before".
(Quite different from the motivation for small teams "damn, that's a great idea!")
So, a business that succeeds once, then twice, in a changing market, is pretty much doomed: they have gone through their innovative phase and now rely on Methodic Inertia to keep going.
The RIAA (like SCO) is just doing what trial lawyers all across America are doing: using lawsuits to extort money. It has worked in the past once or twice.
ROTFL. Truly, the irony in your comment is majestic. I couldn't agree more. Linux is a sham, it just crashes all the time! Why, the ranks of Debian servers in our company crash like, well, at least once every ten years! And we never know whether it's the hardware, the software, or some bizarre combo of the two!
But... in contrast, the Windows clusters we also run, which are necesarily about 20 times more powerful to run the same number of users... well, if we go one month without a serious problem that is entirely and utterly undiagnosable, we consider ourselves lucky.
Linux just keeps demonstrating how it's more equal than anything else. Whatever your systemL complex, large, small, embedded, superclustered, it's starting to be obvious that Linux is the best way of making it come alive.
2003 will be remembered as the year that the word "Linux" became synonymous with cheap, reliable, omnipresent operations.
A standard problem with deploying systems is that as soon as there is a critical mass of users, the bulk of them want stability rather than innovation.
The solution is to have multiple parallel versions, one for the early adopters, one for the mass market, and one for the late adopters.
If this is not possible within Freenet itself (because the network exists as a single entity) then the solution is to have alternative products. It seems quite fair to have (e.g. Gnunet) providing a robust and stable product while Freenet continues to act as a research project: both needs are clear and there is no real need to compromise either of them.
Eventually the question of how to build such networks will be fully understood and the research will end and everyone will migrate to the One Network that does it best.
Consumers have been focussed on low up-front costs for years, the high cost of ink and paper are well-known but rarely figure in buying decisions.
It's not even as if people are kept in the dark, this has been common knowledge for as long as ink jet printers have been around.
And yet people choose cheap printers from HP and Lexmark ignoring the long term ink and paper costs... when companies like Xerox and Canon offer much cheaper ink, but slightly more expensive printers.
It's a classic choice facing consumers: low-upfront plus high maintenance, or high upfront and low maintenance. There are many examples:
- low-energy light bulbs (do you buy these?)
- better insulation in your home
- fuel-efficient cars
- season tickets for transport
- freezing food in the summer when it's cheap
- etc.
The fact is that people value choice, very highly. And when it comes to printers, many people prefer to pay more for ink if they can get away with lower upfront costs.
The manufacturers have generally responded by subsiding printers with ink, and their cartridges are designed to support this business model. You don't have to like it, and we apparently still have choices, but it's a valid business model and people who complain are just being fanciful. Ink is cheap, yes, but printer technology is not: someone has to pay, and it's either in the form of $199 printers and $5 ink, or $45 printers and $25 ink.
If my car only cost $995 new, I'd be very happy to accept restrictions on the spare parts I can use. Fact is, cars and printers are not sold on the same basis.
1. They spend a lot of energy attacking other P2P applications: much of their marketing is simply "we're better than such-and-such". I don't recall such hostility in the P2P camp before ES5 showed up.
2. Their application does not work. Pure and simple.
3. They lie about the number of users online.
4. They have an high number of "features" with no obvious sense or meaning.
5. They distract the user with chat, dating, movie downloads (?).
6. They are highly aggressive: "declare war on the RIAA, Palestinian camp, etc." It sounds like smoke.
Conclusion: the software is not what it seems. A true high quality P2P application needs no marketing whatsoever. It needs almost no "features" (compare ES5 to bittorrent), and it certainly does not need to provide dating, movie downloads (if this worked?), etc.
Software professionals do not build in remote exploits, and do not promote their software with flames. And I would not use something that was built by a non-professional.
And it actually flew, once, unlike most of the waffle we hear from people like Bill Joy.
Languages are just tools, and only an idiot blames tools for the things we make. Windows is (a) the most popular OS on the planet, and (b) written by large teams pushed to compete on features not security. No wonder it's worm heaven. If it was written in Java, it'd just be heaven for another class of parasite.
But Bill Joy is burnt out, his vision of Java Everywhere only came partly true because of massive hyping for years.
Blah. Reading this kind of stuff just makes me wonder whether the industry still has any people with true creative genius left. OK, there's always Larry Wall, and Knoppix. Well, I feel better now. Bill, you can go, thanks!
I tried ES5 some time ago to see whether it worked or not.
It was such junk that I uninstalled it without even managing to find a single thing, illegal, legal, whatever.
If the application was designed to get a community and then hurt them, it is a real failure.
What I suspect is that the people behind ES5 really are a bunch of half-mad Russian programmers paid by oil-quaffing Saudis, who actually believe that their application rocks. And they planned to get 15m users, then approach the highest bidder, advertisers or *AA, selling the captured market. The "encryption" stuff is just to make it impossible to reverse-engineer ES5 clients, and the backdoor is just there to up the ante for selling their shit to the *AA.
On all household goods. Quite small amounts, ranging from a couple of Euros up to twenty or so for larger items.
For PCs, printers, but also DVD players, TVs, fridges, cookers, etc. If it hums and clicks, it gets the "Recyclagebijdrage", a tax by any other name but well worthwile.
Recyling in Belgium is quite advanced, and for the same kind of reasons as in Japan - there is no more room to dump stuff in big holes. Ironically, a world leader in garbage-to-energy powerstations, the Belgian company Seghers, went bankrupt last year. Recycling means these huge "burn it all, really clean" stations are no longer the best solution.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, my experience exactly! My VBScript kernel runs perfectly on a cluster of Windows 98 boxes, which are so stable that I'm using them as a support for the desk.
... HEY!
Linux is obviously a sham, written by weekend hackers, and frankly I'm surprised that the Apache team dared to steal the Microsoft-developed HTTP protocol for their IIS-alike so-called "web server".
IHTB!!
:)
Hehe. Hehehehehehehe.
Businesses only respect those parties who fight and win. The FSF must defend the GPL, it is not about sappy-minded communism but about assuring the free flow of information and ideas needed to sustain a technological revolution.
A revolution, one might add, on which the fortunes of many large companies depend today. The FSF has indirectly added more dollars to the value of the companies that Forbes speaks to than any other single group in the last 20 years.
This article sounds suspiciously like it's been sponsored by someone who wants to hit at the GPL: rather than looking at the quite astonishing savings that people make by using Linux (for free) in their products, they highlight the somewhat "annoying" fact that there is actually a payback for those free goodies, and the GPL is the guarantor of that payback.
Forbes should really be better informed: it's a free market and everyone has the right to write their own commercial software instead of profiting from the work of others and then complaining when the well-established conditions are enforced.
As for Cisco buying a company that had relied on Linux for their key product? Stupid, maybe. But that surely is their problem, not the fault of the FSF.
As an author of many GPL'd products, I'd certainly pay the FSF to enforce my rights. Go for it, hit men!!!
The article is pretty silly but it reflects a general mindset. "Oooh, Microsoft, ooooh, big bad bully!!"
.NET applications to Linux, they can sell them. Wow! Suddenly there is a whole new market of people to buy new Office licenses (oops, did you not read the fine print where it says your old Windows licenses aren't transferrable? Too bad...)
Yes, but even big bad bullies tend to look after their own interests.
It's very hard to imagine hoards of Linux developers jumping onto Mono. Very hard. After all, if the word "individualistic" applied to anything, it'd be Open Source developers.
But imagine another, much more plausible scenario, for an instant in which Linux is incredibly successful, so much that Microsoft realize that Windows, as a proprietary OS, is not going to ever make money again. We're pretty close to that point today.
Now, Microsoft have this huge suite of applications that they want people to use and pay for. But no-one is installing the latest Windows, instead they're taking the cheap and cheerful route and doing with less complex applications, or getting their own made in LAMP.
LAMP... suddenly Microsoft realize that there _is_ a Visual Basic for Linux, and it's doing what VB did on Windows: creating a generation of developers able to get the OS deployed for small-medium business, the core Windows market... OOOPS!
Now, Microsoft suddenly see Mono in a very, very different light. It's their safety-net. If they can port their
Microsoft sell software. That they have depended on Windows to control their market might have worked in the past, but that strategy seems finished.
If they're smart, they are using Mono as an insurance policy which - should Linus die one day in an unfortunate accident - they can also strangle with IP laws.
Either way, I thought Mono was a bad idea when it started, and I still think it's a bad idea. In the best case it's divisive, and in the worst case it is a breachhead for Microsoft to launch its junk on the corporate Linux market.
Uhm, maybe, but the differences are still not extreme. We (my company) buy SCSI drives not because they're faster but because they tend to be better engineered and last longer.
My idea about segmentation is a 20x difference in speed and capacity. E.g:
- 1 50Gb drive operating at 20,000 RPM
- a 1TB drive operating at 1,000 RPM.
Or something. To the point where everyone has one drive of the first kind, and one of the second in their machines.
And dig the Jamaican accent, mahn!
Nice little ditty, I will play this all day tomorrow and drive my co-workers totally crazy, they will be dancing around singing "do the Lindows' Rock"...
Ahl ah need is some o dem dreds, mahn! totally cool, lindows!
There seems an obvious need to segment the HD market into two main slices:
- ultrafast drives with less space
- ultralarge drives with less speed
The first for paging and applications, the second for backups.
voice communications are a huge waste of time...
Amen, brother!
One exception - personal calls where you don't want to say anything important anyhow.
You are right up to a point.
We structure our communications like this:
1. emergencies: phone
2. normal business: web-based workflow
3. random shit: email
Email is too unreliable for the business, and phone are too interruptive for normal work. Oh, and there is a category zero too:
0. personal: mobile.
The most evil form of "communication" I have ever experienced is the conference call. It is almost as bad as PowerPoint.
Actually, I think the business traveller is one of the few people who is assured access to Wifi or other broadband on demand: in airports, hotels, and company locations.
Internal phone systems? People still call from desk to desk instead of sending an email? I'm impressed.
Anyhow, my "business case" is not that, but an argument against VoIP actually becoming a big thing quickly.
And another argument against it: the ink cartridge factor: most people will not pay the up-front costs just to get cheaper calls. They will prefer their existing mobile phones even if it turns out more expensive in the long run.
OTOH, it seems that VoIP will probably happen anyhow, but it'll happen under cover of existing mobile networks, basically a migration of GSM to an IP-based protocol, and possibly a push by mobile operators into the fixed market by offering IP compatability.
Skype will not, I believe, make much impact.
Frankly, these guys have a poor reputation: they make a product that is designed to aid breaches of copyright, they use their network to install spyware and possibly worse on their users' computers...
It's hard enough to keep a clean rep (look at Google), but frankly I'd think twice before installing anything with the label "Made by the Guys who Brought You Kazaa!".
Despite that, VoIP still has one problem: voice is simply less flexible useful than text messaging, for most people.
IMHO, voice is only useful when I'm away from my desk, and this will only work when VoIP marries Wifi, and since widespread Wifi is still going to be a pipedream for at least a year or two, there sits VoIP.
I predict the next generation of small mobile VoIP handsets will be extremely popular with business travellers, and pretty much ignored by the general population.
(From the days when astronomers ground their own mirrors).
"The fastest way to grind a large mirror is to first grind a small mirror, then grind the large mirror."
In other words, some problems are so complex that you can only solve them one at a time.
Having possibly learnt this trick from Microsoft. XSF is, whatever else might be defined in the original contract with AT&T, a work produced by SGI. Now, if I license a product from a company, and distribute my own works with that product, I would be quite angry if I was told those works were "derivative".
Yet this seems to be what SCO are arguing. The original SYS V license was, it appears, so powerful that its mere presence on a disk would turn all other software into Unix source code!
It is amusing when you consider the hate focussed onto the GPL for applying a much milder form of a "viral license", namely that true derived works are permitted under certain conditions.
Let me start...
I just switched from Mozilla mail to KMail after Mozilla lost my entire configuration and insisted on creating a new profile every time I launched it.
Didn't try Evolution...
When SCO get trashed in court and The Darly Gang get sent to jail for a nine-month reaming, Linux is going to hit the headlines like never before:
- LINUX WINS
- LINUX BEATS OFF THE INCUMBENTS
- LINUX... THE NEXT TERMINATOR?
I predict that the small slowdown in Linux installations over the last months will reverse into an explosion when this happens.
Overall, quite a weak showing from the Darly Gang and their friends the Redmond Boys. One would really have expected a little better.
Medium-to-large businesses do not generally create or invent business strategies, what they do is to take existing strategies, and refine them slowly and carefully. The biggest reason for doing something is that "it worked before".
(Quite different from the motivation for small teams "damn, that's a great idea!")
So, a business that succeeds once, then twice, in a changing market, is pretty much doomed: they have gone through their innovative phase and now rely on Methodic Inertia to keep going.
The RIAA (like SCO) is just doing what trial lawyers all across America are doing: using lawsuits to extort money. It has worked in the past once or twice.
Linux lacks reliability...
ROTFL. Truly, the irony in your comment is majestic. I couldn't agree more. Linux is a sham, it just crashes all the time! Why, the ranks of Debian servers in our company crash like, well, at least once every ten years! And we never know whether it's the hardware, the software, or some bizarre combo of the two!
But... in contrast, the Windows clusters we also run, which are necesarily about 20 times more powerful to run the same number of users... well, if we go one month without a serious problem that is entirely and utterly undiagnosable, we consider ourselves lucky.
Hahahaha. Keep 'em rolling!
Linux just keeps demonstrating how it's more equal than anything else. Whatever your systemL complex, large, small, embedded, superclustered, it's starting to be obvious that Linux is the best way of making it come alive.
2003 will be remembered as the year that the word "Linux" became synonymous with cheap, reliable, omnipresent operations.
A standard problem with deploying systems is that as soon as there is a critical mass of users, the bulk of them want stability rather than innovation.
The solution is to have multiple parallel versions, one for the early adopters, one for the mass market, and one for the late adopters.
If this is not possible within Freenet itself (because the network exists as a single entity) then the solution is to have alternative products. It seems quite fair to have (e.g. Gnunet) providing a robust and stable product while Freenet continues to act as a research project: both needs are clear and there is no real need to compromise either of them.
Eventually the question of how to build such networks will be fully understood and the research will end and everyone will migrate to the One Network that does it best.
Until then, yay, more Freenet, and more choice!
Consumers have been focussed on low up-front costs for years, the high cost of ink and paper are well-known but rarely figure in buying decisions.
It's not even as if people are kept in the dark, this has been common knowledge for as long as ink jet printers have been around.
And yet people choose cheap printers from HP and Lexmark ignoring the long term ink and paper costs... when companies like Xerox and Canon offer much cheaper ink, but slightly more expensive printers.
It's a classic choice facing consumers: low-upfront plus high maintenance, or high upfront and low maintenance. There are many examples:
- low-energy light bulbs (do you buy these?)
- better insulation in your home
- fuel-efficient cars
- season tickets for transport
- freezing food in the summer when it's cheap
- etc.
The fact is that people value choice, very highly. And when it comes to printers, many people prefer to pay more for ink if they can get away with lower upfront costs.
The manufacturers have generally responded by subsiding printers with ink, and their cartridges are designed to support this business model. You don't have to like it, and we apparently still have choices, but it's a valid business model and people who complain are just being fanciful. Ink is cheap, yes, but printer technology is not: someone has to pay, and it's either in the form of $199 printers and $5 ink, or $45 printers and $25 ink.
If my car only cost $995 new, I'd be very happy to accept restrictions on the spare parts I can use. Fact is, cars and printers are not sold on the same basis.
1. They spend a lot of energy attacking other P2P applications: much of their marketing is simply "we're better than such-and-such". I don't recall such hostility in the P2P camp before ES5 showed up.
2. Their application does not work. Pure and simple.
3. They lie about the number of users online.
4. They have an high number of "features" with no obvious sense or meaning.
5. They distract the user with chat, dating, movie downloads (?).
6. They are highly aggressive: "declare war on the RIAA, Palestinian camp, etc." It sounds like smoke.
Conclusion: the software is not what it seems. A true high quality P2P application needs no marketing whatsoever. It needs almost no "features" (compare ES5 to bittorrent), and it certainly does not need to provide dating, movie downloads (if this worked?), etc.
Software professionals do not build in remote exploits, and do not promote their software with flames. And I would not use something that was built by a non-professional.
And it actually flew, once, unlike most of the waffle we hear from people like Bill Joy.
Languages are just tools, and only an idiot blames tools for the things we make. Windows is (a) the most popular OS on the planet, and (b) written by large teams pushed to compete on features not security. No wonder it's worm heaven. If it was written in Java, it'd just be heaven for another class of parasite.
But Bill Joy is burnt out, his vision of Java Everywhere only came partly true because of massive hyping for years.
Blah. Reading this kind of stuff just makes me wonder whether the industry still has any people with true creative genius left. OK, there's always Larry Wall, and Knoppix. Well, I feel better now. Bill, you can go, thanks!
I tried ES5 some time ago to see whether it worked or not.
It was such junk that I uninstalled it without even managing to find a single thing, illegal, legal, whatever.
If the application was designed to get a community and then hurt them, it is a real failure.
What I suspect is that the people behind ES5 really are a bunch of half-mad Russian programmers paid by oil-quaffing Saudis, who actually believe that their application rocks. And they planned to get 15m users, then approach the highest bidder, advertisers or *AA, selling the captured market. The "encryption" stuff is just to make it impossible to reverse-engineer ES5 clients, and the backdoor is just there to up the ante for selling their shit to the *AA.
A poor plan, horribly implemented.
On all household goods. Quite small amounts, ranging from a couple of Euros up to twenty or so for larger items.
For PCs, printers, but also DVD players, TVs, fridges, cookers, etc. If it hums and clicks, it gets the "Recyclagebijdrage", a tax by any other name but well worthwile.
Recyling in Belgium is quite advanced, and for the same kind of reasons as in Japan - there is no more room to dump stuff in big holes. Ironically, a world leader in garbage-to-energy powerstations, the Belgian company Seghers, went bankrupt last year. Recycling means these huge "burn it all, really clean" stations are no longer the best solution.