Nice interview, refreshingly honest and without a trace of the PR droidism and jargon that makes most interviews with guys in his position meaningless. So he's not 100 per cent redhot-wedded to ATI and may "go green" at some stage? As he says, dependence on a single supplier is a risk and a weakness. It's especially good to hear him say "everything is down to the people; without them a company is nothing" when most other executives babble about outsourcing and the digital lifestyle, meaning they've fired everyone they can lay their hands on, done a deal with a call center outfit in Bangalore and bought themselves a new Ferrari on the proceeds.
It seems the usual Stallman stuff we've heard before with some bitter-sounding remarks about Linus Torvalds thrown in. It makes one wonder whether Stallman is really motivated by a massive grudge against Torvalds for stealing his thunder all those years ago. Creepier still is a comment later on - "I don't criticise and condemn people just because they don't stand up for free software strongly as I do" - which is completely undermined by what he has said earlier about Torvalds.
By now a great number of highly talented people have contributed a lot to Linux. It's rather revealing that only one of them hogs the limelight and witters on about "the community" all the time. Your community but not necessarily mine, RMS. The fact that I use GNU/Linux gives you no right to speak on my behalf.
This is a non-article. It has a pompous title, "Prisoner of Redmond", followed by some tittle-tattle from 20-30 years ago that only gives one side of the story, then it cuts to today and a court case that has no real connection with the rest of the article. The end is pure opinion: "Based purely on character (or lack of it), I confidently predict that Microsoft is going down."
I'm no fan of Microsoft (Linux here) but you don't get to where Gates is today by being a man with no talent or qualities. I'm still waiting for a lot of Cringely's oh-so-confident predictions about Google and their alleged container-size data centers to pan out. He seems to have gone very quiet on that front lately. Spinning a highly dubious yarn from yesteryear is no substitute for some journalism. Just my 2 cents, but I think Cringely is getting lazy.
There's no point worrying about this. After Vista is released, users will form a consensus about what you need to run it and that will form the basis of 1001 tech articles around the net.
In the meantime, the "official" sources all have vested interests and aren't to be trusted. There is, after all, a big difference between the specs on which Vista will work in theory and those on which it will work without giving the user an ulcer, quite aside from being able to turn on every feature.
I'm more interested in knowing how much the Vista versions are going to cost.
This isn't really news. It's long been clear that Microsoft will fight every ruling against them in Korea or anywhere else using any methods to hand. And if you were sitting on a vast monopoly with gross margins of up to 85 per cent to protect, with captains of industry and heads of government queuing up to kiss your ass, you probably would too.
Where I live (not USA), the thing that is holding back new devices is the insane connectivity costs imposted by the mobile companies. 3g and the trimmings is out unless it is on business expenses. Using an "ordinary" old mobile is expensive enough. Naturally if you impose a greed-crazed charging structure like this, as if megabytes were as rare and precious as diamonds, there will appear to be no demand for all-in-one devices, phones with mp3 players, etc. Someone, somewhere will suss this eventually and if they make a fortune by breaking up the cosy club and bringing all-in-one to the mass market they will thoroughly deserve it.
Vista and MS Office 2007 are the two headline-grabbing cash cows of the business and Microsoft has nothing to show until next year. Folks can scent blood behind the scenes with rumours of massive rewrites, etc. Microsoft is a big business with lots of products, but these are the two everyone focuses on, in the pop press at least. And the press and Wall Street have the whole of the rest of this year to stick it to Microsoft, if they so choose, and get a little payback for all the uppity treatment they've received over the years. And with nothing in the locker except more press announcements that no one really believes, Microsoft will just have to stand there and take it on the chin.
2006 could turn out to be Microsoft's annus horribilis, since the chances must be very high they'll soon have to fess up and say Janaury 2007 is a bad time to launch Vista. And with every day that passes, more folks will get pissed off with the XP malware explosion. Couldn't have happened to nicer guys:):)
Focusing on one thing at a time is a skill that takes lot of practice, imho. Generally in the West we are not brought up to do that - just look at the trouble most folks have with meditation even for a few minutes. Focusing just on listening is hard, too, and taking notes is often a way of not listening. IME, many of the laptop/crackberry/mobile toting characters in an audience are not showing Continuous Partial Attention so much as trying to assert their dominance in the pecking order. If they are carrying all this kit and need to be so connected, well then they must be big, alpha cheeses. Usually they aren't and the ones to watch are those concentrating and not even taking notes. If I make a habit of lugging all this stuff around, then I have become my own slave-driver and show, too, that I cannot organize my own day. That is really not alpha at all.
If Novell got a dollar every time they made an announcement, they'd be making billions by now. This new idea may turn out to be excellent, but it comes over as more jargon piled on top of all the existing Novell jargon: "The project... will leverage virtualization, identity management and resource management to deliver a flexible and adaptive data center." Yeah, right. Today it's the data center and tomorrow it might be back to talking about mono again. All this talk just suggests that Novell don't really know where they are going. Maybe they should take a leaf out of Red Hat's book, keep quiet and concentrate on growing corporate revenues which is the only thing that will save them.
Novell have sounded as if they are for the chop for quite a while now so Microsoft's "triumphant" announcement isn't a great deal more than the equivalent of breaking into a hospital room and trying to roger the patient. Maybe Tim O'Reilly's next annual hoedown will be marked by Microsoft announcing that more Windows books are sold than O'Reilly sells open source books, so "therefore" O'Reilly must be no good? Exactly what are Microsoft so frightened of?
Not many corporations make a habit of crossing the road to stomp on some luckless fellow just for the hell of it, but Microsoft do. Some day, their behaviour is going to come back on Microsoft like a whirlwind. It's easy to say this is just the nature of capitalism. But most companies - not to mention individuals - have more sense than to stamp on every set of fingers they find. It's not only bad for the soul, it positively asking for a horrendous payback: one day, when you need a friend or a favour, you will find absolutely no one there.
Of course it is about market share. You cannot set standards and control things without it. There is also the matter of genuine innovation, as distinct from marketing BS claiming innovation. In a Wintel monopoly there will be little innovation because the main thrust is to preserve the monopoly. Fat stockholders will think this wonderful until someone else - the Chinese maybe - suddenly turns the tables and then we'll all be sorry. Imagine living somewhere where the only place you could ever eat out was Macdonalds. That's what the Wintel monopoly means to software.
I am seeking a person of the utmost trustfulness, which I believe you to be the same, to resolve a most delicate matter that has come to light in recently translated documents. I am the personal Financial and Securities Manager to Mr Tariq Aziz of Baghdad City who deposited the sum of 20 million dollars specie in the Bank of Santa Maria et Commerciale, Lagos, for the purchase of tractor parts and chandeliers. By twisted fate my client is unavoidably detained in his domicile to entirely unforeseen social eventualities and has let it be known via said translation that he seeks you to act as intermediary in this matter through a personal bank account...
No worries. If a potential employer takes offence at something Google throws up about me, they aren't the right employer for me. Probably humorless, management-theory-obsessed types who'll abscond with the pension contributions anyway. Their loss will be someone else's gain. There's more to life than worrying about some sad-sack snooper in human resources.
Oh well, coming on top of famine, drought, peak oil, bird flu, hiv, cancer, global warming, wars, the North Pole melting, earthquakes, resurgent Islam and thermo-nuclear trouble in Iraq - news always available in a newspaper near you - I guess I'll just have to put this one down to yet another paragraph I failed to read at the bottom of the End User's Licence Agreement called life.
Maybe a key line in the interview is this: "One of the things about the Internet is that every experiment is tried," he [Schmidt] said. Maybe Google doesn't have a grand masterplan, which so many folks assume it has. Maybe they take that line about the internet at face value. They try lots of things, and if one works they go for it. Most outfits don't have the resources to scale a success very quickly, but Google do with their truly huge computer farms. And if it doesn't work, no big deal, they run it down or can it. I've no idea whether this is the case, but looking at Google in this way makes it easier to understand, a little less of a mystery. They are opportunists and they pride themselves on not being a big fat corporation that like an oil tanker takes five miles to change course by ten degrees.
The emphasis on trust is very sticky for them now, though. Google's pitch that it was the company that dealt (or could be trusted to deal) with the world's information has been blown out of the water by the China venture and the recent court stuff about handing over records. I suspect this is going to come back and bite their ass bigtime. Once perhaps Google was the natural "information company"; now they are just another corporation angling for your dollars. Better than plenty, but no longer unique.
Yes, I realize the legal position is tricky to say the least and none of this is down to Ubuntu, which cannot be expected to fight alone. However, I do wonder whether something couldn't be worked out which the whole oss community could get behind. Some of the non-free problems rather call the bluff of the big operators - whether Red Hat, Sun or even IBM - who prattle on about open source love but promptly disappear when the realities of "user-friendly" and "ease of use are mentioned.
Ok, good idea, kudos to the author. However, Ubuntu need to sharpen up a bit if they want to get into the corporate market and play for the bigtime, which they say they do. Using a third-party script, however useful, comes over as a bit amateur. (Some might say the strange new tangerine theme in the Dapper Drake edition comes over in the same way, but that's another story.)
Automatix sounds a good half-way house that will become better as it gets refined and polished. But the real question is why this stuff should have to be downloaded separately in the first place. I know it is not Ubuntu's fault and is common to Linux generally, but until desktop distros knock this missing multimedia and non-free apps issue completely on the head to the point where it is just history, there will still be hassles for new users. The write-up for Automatix mentions the dread word "terminal" which is enough to make plenty of new users feel queasy.
Perhaps Ubuntu should step back, stop trying to reinvent so many wheels and come up with something really new and worthwhile such as an improved apt which offers more granular choices and clearer explanations of what programs do what. If I am new to Linux and I want a suite of best of breed apps, I will still be Googling next month before I work my way through all the mysterious items thrown up by Synaptic. For example, Ubuntu installs Evolution by default. But what would I get (or lose) if I opted subsequently for Thunderbird or Sylpheed-Claws? All good programs, but it shouldn't be too hard to build some kind of "guidance" into apt to help me make some better-informed choices from a smaller list of options. The same is true of, say, Xine, MPlayer or VideoLan and many other things.
I don't think anyone has established that there is a market for an "enterprise desktop", whatever that is. Sounds like something cooked up in the marketing department. It would be interesting to know what Novell's sales figures for their "enterprise desktop" editions are so far.
Just my 2 cents, but I wish Novell would drop this stuff and concentrate on a single, excellent distribution called SuSE Linux whose cost range from free (no support) on up, depending on the support wanted and the software actually used, etc. The kind of installation required should the choice of the user: the result of a granular installer and policy/lock-down tool. It should not be the result of the marketing folks trying it on which just leaves the user feeling powerless.
Considering Novell's rather precarious financial situation they might not have much to lose by taking a few risks such as, gasp, not doing exactly the same as everyone else right down to the droidish marketing babble about "seamless integration", etc.
Jeez, it must be tough being the super-successful CEO of a super-successful company. You come up with this great idea to invade people's living-rooms - why bother to be asked in? - and then learn that you'll have to take your place in the queue. A few other guys are eager to knock the door down and start lifting Joe Sixpack's wallet: Microsoft, Apple, Intel, AMD, Sony, Samsung, AOL Time-Warner, Google, Amazon, a dozen telcos, a couple of dozen huge media combines like NI, several hundred ISPs, a clutch of VOIP outfits, Blockbuster, Hollywood, the music industry, major retail chains, and a few thousand internet fraud artists and phishing rings. One at a time boys!
I guess this is some kind of bullshit bubble. There aren't enough living-rooms to go round to service this lot even once, and when folks discover that the "living-room of the future" offers the same crap TV as today except with overpriced and murky video-conferencing, they are likely to fit a few new locks on the door and get out the big scissors when they see Mr Suit's fingers straying towards their wallet again. Me, I'm going to stay inside and watch a couple of dozen CEOs brawling and shouting on the lawn outside.
When I tried live.com (Firefox on Debian) I clicked on the Safety Center widget hoping for some hot tips but got this message instead: "Oops, we seem to be having a problem with this feed. Please try again later.". I then tried their "Live" searchbox at the top of the page but after a minute of staring at a white screen which just said "Loading..." I gave up. After that I clicked on tabs which said "News" and "Images" but these also produced a entirely blank if quite restful white screen.
Good to see that things worked just as one would expect from MS. Naturally I would unhesitatingly recommend live.com - my small contribution to Micosoft's prodigious "Net Promoter" score. When folks get back to me saying live.com doesn't work, I'll be suggesting they another website and, preferably, try Mac OS or Ubuntu as well.
If Torvalds declared he was simply walking away from it all, one really couldn't blame him considering the sometimes disgusting criticism levelled at him. And what has he done, apart from helping to give the world a free operating system, inspiring the open source movement and saying simply "Please treat me with the freedoms and respect I extend to you"?
Mr Torvalds is just one guy, an engineer with an optimistic, congenial outlook on life, not a professinal advocate or evangelist with a foundation or six behind him full of law professors. Have Lessig and Moglen condemned some of the personal criticism levelled at Torvalds or would that be too much like hard work?
Yet as a hard-working regular guy Torvalds has a better grasp of daily realities than many of his critics. Tightening up on software patents is a good idea, but rejecting DRM as the devil's work is a poor idea, perhaps simply immature. As the underdog in this affair he gets my support every time. If a better, revised GPLv3 emerges, one that two people or more can actually understand and agree upon, which is more than can be said for the present draft, then Torvalds will deserve our gratitude for sticking up for what he believes despite the hyena-like behaviour of some in the open source world.
So Vista is coming to seem more and more like an XP service pack with a massive price tag and unwelcome restrictions. I don't know why Gates doesn't throw in the towel and announce that from now on the chair of Microsoft will be held on a rotating basis by the chairs of the major Hollywood studios. All Microsoft seem to be doing these days in the consumer market is kowtowing to the content providers while trying to grab a slice of the action for themselves. Microsoft offer no vision, no inspiration or feel-good factor. It's a pathetic end to the dream of a computer on every desk. What we have instead is a glorified credit card processor.
No, you are incorrect. That is what I originally thought. It is +/- 56 million a quarter from their open source stuff, but of that 43 million is the Open Enterprise Server Netware replacement stuff. Pure Linux is only 13 million of which they say SuSE and co is only 10 million. That is why the figures struck me as pretty scary and why they quoted that analyst saying Red Hat were five times ahead. At least, this is how I read the figures.
The financial figures are frightening. Novell booked $274.4 m in revenue, of which around $56 m was from open source products, of which around $13 m was pure Linux (the rest was Netware OES), of which only $10 m was from SuSE Linux ( a 22 per cent improvement). The article then quoted an analyst who said that Red Hat's Linux growth was twice as large and their revenue from Linux was five times larger.
Put it another way, a couple of years into their Linux story, Novell is turning over around $1 billion of which pure Linux contributes around $50 m, and much of the rest is declining legacy stuff. This is a drop in the ocean, and all the harder when Red Hat appear to be creaming Novell at the sharp end.
$50 m compared to $1 billion. I don't know how Novell is going to get out of this one, but talking about changes to SuSE or Ximian or yet more sugar-daddy spending on open source projects is like the Titanic and deckchairs. It's very hard to see Novell avoiding a break up.
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Nice interview, refreshingly honest and without a trace of the PR droidism and jargon that makes most interviews with guys in his position meaningless. So he's not 100 per cent redhot-wedded to ATI and may "go green" at some stage? As he says, dependence on a single supplier is a risk and a weakness. It's especially good to hear him say "everything is down to the people; without them a company is nothing" when most other executives babble about outsourcing and the digital lifestyle, meaning they've fired everyone they can lay their hands on, done a deal with a call center outfit in Bangalore and bought themselves a new Ferrari on the proceeds.
It seems the usual Stallman stuff we've heard before with some bitter-sounding remarks about Linus Torvalds thrown in. It makes one wonder whether Stallman is really motivated by a massive grudge against Torvalds for stealing his thunder all those years ago. Creepier still is a comment later on - "I don't criticise and condemn people just because they don't stand up for free software strongly as I do" - which is completely undermined by what he has said earlier about Torvalds.
By now a great number of highly talented people have contributed a lot to Linux. It's rather revealing that only one of them hogs the limelight and witters on about "the community" all the time. Your community but not necessarily mine, RMS. The fact that I use GNU/Linux gives you no right to speak on my behalf.
This is a non-article. It has a pompous title, "Prisoner of Redmond", followed by some tittle-tattle from 20-30 years ago that only gives one side of the story, then it cuts to today and a court case that has no real connection with the rest of the article. The end is pure opinion: "Based purely on character (or lack of it), I confidently predict that Microsoft is going down."
I'm no fan of Microsoft (Linux here) but you don't get to where Gates is today by being a man with no talent or qualities. I'm still waiting for a lot of Cringely's oh-so-confident predictions about Google and their alleged container-size data centers to pan out. He seems to have gone very quiet on that front lately. Spinning a highly dubious yarn from yesteryear is no substitute for some journalism. Just my 2 cents, but I think Cringely is getting lazy.
There's no point worrying about this. After Vista is released, users will form a consensus about what you need to run it and that will form the basis of 1001 tech articles around the net.
In the meantime, the "official" sources all have vested interests and aren't to be trusted. There is, after all, a big difference between the specs on which Vista will work in theory and those on which it will work without giving the user an ulcer, quite aside from being able to turn on every feature.
I'm more interested in knowing how much the Vista versions are going to cost.
This isn't really news. It's long been clear that Microsoft will fight every ruling against them in Korea or anywhere else using any methods to hand. And if you were sitting on a vast monopoly with gross margins of up to 85 per cent to protect, with captains of industry and heads of government queuing up to kiss your ass, you probably would too.
Where I live (not USA), the thing that is holding back new devices is the insane connectivity costs imposted by the mobile companies. 3g and the trimmings is out unless it is on business expenses. Using an "ordinary" old mobile is expensive enough. Naturally if you impose a greed-crazed charging structure like this, as if megabytes were as rare and precious as diamonds, there will appear to be no demand for all-in-one devices, phones with mp3 players, etc. Someone, somewhere will suss this eventually and if they make a fortune by breaking up the cosy club and bringing all-in-one to the mass market they will thoroughly deserve it.
Vista and MS Office 2007 are the two headline-grabbing cash cows of the business and Microsoft has nothing to show until next year. Folks can scent blood behind the scenes with rumours of massive rewrites, etc. Microsoft is a big business with lots of products, but these are the two everyone focuses on, in the pop press at least. And the press and Wall Street have the whole of the rest of this year to stick it to Microsoft, if they so choose, and get a little payback for all the uppity treatment they've received over the years. And with nothing in the locker except more press announcements that no one really believes, Microsoft will just have to stand there and take it on the chin.
:):)
2006 could turn out to be Microsoft's annus horribilis, since the chances must be very high they'll soon have to fess up and say Janaury 2007 is a bad time to launch Vista. And with every day that passes, more folks will get pissed off with the XP malware explosion. Couldn't have happened to nicer guys
Focusing on one thing at a time is a skill that takes lot of practice, imho. Generally in the West we are not brought up to do that - just look at the trouble most folks have with meditation even for a few minutes. Focusing just on listening is hard, too, and taking notes is often a way of not listening. IME, many of the laptop/crackberry/mobile toting characters in an audience are not showing Continuous Partial Attention so much as trying to assert their dominance in the pecking order. If they are carrying all this kit and need to be so connected, well then they must be big, alpha cheeses. Usually they aren't and the ones to watch are those concentrating and not even taking notes. If I make a habit of lugging all this stuff around, then I have become my own slave-driver and show, too, that I cannot organize my own day. That is really not alpha at all.
If Novell got a dollar every time they made an announcement, they'd be making billions by now. This new idea may turn out to be excellent, but it comes over as more jargon piled on top of all the existing Novell jargon: "The project ... will leverage virtualization, identity management and resource management to deliver a flexible and adaptive data center." Yeah, right. Today it's the data center and tomorrow it might be back to talking about mono again. All this talk just suggests that Novell don't really know where they are going. Maybe they should take a leaf out of Red Hat's book, keep quiet and concentrate on growing corporate revenues which is the only thing that will save them.
Novell have sounded as if they are for the chop for quite a while now so Microsoft's "triumphant" announcement isn't a great deal more than the equivalent of breaking into a hospital room and trying to roger the patient. Maybe Tim O'Reilly's next annual hoedown will be marked by Microsoft announcing that more Windows books are sold than O'Reilly sells open source books, so "therefore" O'Reilly must be no good? Exactly what are Microsoft so frightened of?
Not many corporations make a habit of crossing the road to stomp on some luckless fellow just for the hell of it, but Microsoft do. Some day, their behaviour is going to come back on Microsoft like a whirlwind. It's easy to say this is just the nature of capitalism. But most companies - not to mention individuals - have more sense than to stamp on every set of fingers they find. It's not only bad for the soul, it positively asking for a horrendous payback: one day, when you need a friend or a favour, you will find absolutely no one there.
Of course it is about market share. You cannot set standards and control things without it. There is also the matter of genuine innovation, as distinct from marketing BS claiming innovation. In a Wintel monopoly there will be little innovation because the main thrust is to preserve the monopoly. Fat stockholders will think this wonderful until someone else - the Chinese maybe - suddenly turns the tables and then we'll all be sorry. Imagine living somewhere where the only place you could ever eat out was Macdonalds. That's what the Wintel monopoly means to software.
Bot - probably an unfortunate choice of name considering what caring for the elderly almost always comes to involve.
Esteemed Sir
...
I am seeking a person of the utmost trustfulness, which I believe you to be the same, to resolve a most delicate matter that has come to light in recently translated documents. I am the personal Financial and Securities Manager to Mr Tariq Aziz of Baghdad City who deposited the sum of 20 million dollars specie in the Bank of Santa Maria et Commerciale, Lagos, for the purchase of tractor parts and chandeliers. By twisted fate my client is unavoidably detained in his domicile to entirely unforeseen social eventualities and has let it be known via said translation that he seeks you to act as intermediary in this matter through a personal bank account
No worries. If a potential employer takes offence at something Google throws up about me, they aren't the right employer for me. Probably humorless, management-theory-obsessed types who'll abscond with the pension contributions anyway. Their loss will be someone else's gain. There's more to life than worrying about some sad-sack snooper in human resources.
Oh well, coming on top of famine, drought, peak oil, bird flu, hiv, cancer, global warming, wars, the North Pole melting, earthquakes, resurgent Islam and thermo-nuclear trouble in Iraq - news always available in a newspaper near you - I guess I'll just have to put this one down to yet another paragraph I failed to read at the bottom of the End User's Licence Agreement called life.
Maybe a key line in the interview is this: "One of the things about the Internet is that every experiment is tried," he [Schmidt] said. Maybe Google doesn't have a grand masterplan, which so many folks assume it has. Maybe they take that line about the internet at face value. They try lots of things, and if one works they go for it. Most outfits don't have the resources to scale a success very quickly, but Google do with their truly huge computer farms. And if it doesn't work, no big deal, they run it down or can it. I've no idea whether this is the case, but looking at Google in this way makes it easier to understand, a little less of a mystery. They are opportunists and they pride themselves on not being a big fat corporation that like an oil tanker takes five miles to change course by ten degrees.
The emphasis on trust is very sticky for them now, though. Google's pitch that it was the company that dealt (or could be trusted to deal) with the world's information has been blown out of the water by the China venture and the recent court stuff about handing over records. I suspect this is going to come back and bite their ass bigtime. Once perhaps Google was the natural "information company"; now they are just another corporation angling for your dollars. Better than plenty, but no longer unique.
Yes, I realize the legal position is tricky to say the least and none of this is down to Ubuntu, which cannot be expected to fight alone. However, I do wonder whether something couldn't be worked out which the whole oss community could get behind. Some of the non-free problems rather call the bluff of the big operators - whether Red Hat, Sun or even IBM - who prattle on about open source love but promptly disappear when the realities of "user-friendly" and "ease of use are mentioned.
Ok, good idea, kudos to the author. However, Ubuntu need to sharpen up a bit if they want to get into the corporate market and play for the bigtime, which they say they do. Using a third-party script, however useful, comes over as a bit amateur. (Some might say the strange new tangerine theme in the Dapper Drake edition comes over in the same way, but that's another story.)
Automatix sounds a good half-way house that will become better as it gets refined and polished. But the real question is why this stuff should have to be downloaded separately in the first place. I know it is not Ubuntu's fault and is common to Linux generally, but until desktop distros knock this missing multimedia and non-free apps issue completely on the head to the point where it is just history, there will still be hassles for new users. The write-up for Automatix mentions the dread word "terminal" which is enough to make plenty of new users feel queasy.
Perhaps Ubuntu should step back, stop trying to reinvent so many wheels and come up with something really new and worthwhile such as an improved apt which offers more granular choices and clearer explanations of what programs do what. If I am new to Linux and I want a suite of best of breed apps, I will still be Googling next month before I work my way through all the mysterious items thrown up by Synaptic. For example, Ubuntu installs Evolution by default. But what would I get (or lose) if I opted subsequently for Thunderbird or Sylpheed-Claws? All good programs, but it shouldn't be too hard to build some kind of "guidance" into apt to help me make some better-informed choices from a smaller list of options. The same is true of, say, Xine, MPlayer or VideoLan and many other things.
I don't think anyone has established that there is a market for an "enterprise desktop", whatever that is. Sounds like something cooked up in the marketing department. It would be interesting to know what Novell's sales figures for their "enterprise desktop" editions are so far. Just my 2 cents, but I wish Novell would drop this stuff and concentrate on a single, excellent distribution called SuSE Linux whose cost range from free (no support) on up, depending on the support wanted and the software actually used, etc. The kind of installation required should the choice of the user: the result of a granular installer and policy/lock-down tool. It should not be the result of the marketing folks trying it on which just leaves the user feeling powerless. Considering Novell's rather precarious financial situation they might not have much to lose by taking a few risks such as, gasp, not doing exactly the same as everyone else right down to the droidish marketing babble about "seamless integration", etc.
Jeez, it must be tough being the super-successful CEO of a super-successful company. You come up with this great idea to invade people's living-rooms - why bother to be asked in? - and then learn that you'll have to take your place in the queue. A few other guys are eager to knock the door down and start lifting Joe Sixpack's wallet: Microsoft, Apple, Intel, AMD, Sony, Samsung, AOL Time-Warner, Google, Amazon, a dozen telcos, a couple of dozen huge media combines like NI, several hundred ISPs, a clutch of VOIP outfits, Blockbuster, Hollywood, the music industry, major retail chains, and a few thousand internet fraud artists and phishing rings. One at a time boys!
I guess this is some kind of bullshit bubble. There aren't enough living-rooms to go round to service this lot even once, and when folks discover that the "living-room of the future" offers the same crap TV as today except with overpriced and murky video-conferencing, they are likely to fit a few new locks on the door and get out the big scissors when they see Mr Suit's fingers straying towards their wallet again. Me, I'm going to stay inside and watch a couple of dozen CEOs brawling and shouting on the lawn outside.
When I tried live.com (Firefox on Debian) I clicked on the Safety Center widget hoping for some hot tips but got this message instead: "Oops, we seem to be having a problem with this feed. Please try again later.". I then tried their "Live" searchbox at the top of the page but after a minute of staring at a white screen which just said "Loading ..." I gave up. After that I clicked on tabs which said "News" and "Images" but these also produced a entirely blank if quite restful white screen.
Good to see that things worked just as one would expect from MS. Naturally I would unhesitatingly recommend live.com - my small contribution to Micosoft's prodigious "Net Promoter" score. When folks get back to me saying live.com doesn't work, I'll be suggesting they another website and, preferably, try Mac OS or Ubuntu as well.
If Torvalds declared he was simply walking away from it all, one really couldn't blame him considering the sometimes disgusting criticism levelled at him. And what has he done, apart from helping to give the world a free operating system, inspiring the open source movement and saying simply "Please treat me with the freedoms and respect I extend to you"?
Mr Torvalds is just one guy, an engineer with an optimistic, congenial outlook on life, not a professinal advocate or evangelist with a foundation or six behind him full of law professors. Have Lessig and Moglen condemned some of the personal criticism levelled at Torvalds or would that be too much like hard work?
Yet as a hard-working regular guy Torvalds has a better grasp of daily realities than many of his critics. Tightening up on software patents is a good idea, but rejecting DRM as the devil's work is a poor idea, perhaps simply immature. As the underdog in this affair he gets my support every time. If a better, revised GPLv3 emerges, one that two people or more can actually understand and agree upon, which is more than can be said for the present draft, then Torvalds will deserve our gratitude for sticking up for what he believes despite the hyena-like behaviour of some in the open source world.
So Vista is coming to seem more and more like an XP service pack with a massive price tag and unwelcome restrictions. I don't know why Gates doesn't throw in the towel and announce that from now on the chair of Microsoft will be held on a rotating basis by the chairs of the major Hollywood studios. All Microsoft seem to be doing these days in the consumer market is kowtowing to the content providers while trying to grab a slice of the action for themselves. Microsoft offer no vision, no inspiration or feel-good factor. It's a pathetic end to the dream of a computer on every desk. What we have instead is a glorified credit card processor.
No, you are incorrect. That is what I originally thought. It is +/- 56 million a quarter from their open source stuff, but of that 43 million is the Open Enterprise Server Netware replacement stuff. Pure Linux is only 13 million of which they say SuSE and co is only 10 million. That is why the figures struck me as pretty scary and why they quoted that analyst saying Red Hat were five times ahead. At least, this is how I read the figures.
The financial figures are frightening. Novell booked $274.4 m in revenue, of which around $56 m was from open source products, of which around $13 m was pure Linux (the rest was Netware OES), of which only $10 m was from SuSE Linux ( a 22 per cent improvement). The article then quoted an analyst who said that Red Hat's Linux growth was twice as large and their revenue from Linux was five times larger.
Put it another way, a couple of years into their Linux story, Novell is turning over around $1 billion of which pure Linux contributes around $50 m, and much of the rest is declining legacy stuff. This is a drop in the ocean, and all the harder when Red Hat appear to be creaming Novell at the sharp end.
$50 m compared to $1 billion. I don't know how Novell is going to get out of this one, but talking about changes to SuSE or Ximian or yet more sugar-daddy spending on open source projects is like the Titanic and deckchairs. It's very hard to see Novell avoiding a break up.