Ah, I expect you're an American and are having trouble finding Borneo on a map while whining about the high price of gas for your 8 miles to the gallon SUV. Reading Slashdot is a great way to discover that most Americans appear to know nothing of the world outside the USA other than how to bomb it.
It looks like it's taking a dump on camera, which I guess is how many of us might feel if we had to live in a forest "owned" by businessmen, generals and politicians who are plundering it as fast as they can launder and bank their ill-gotten gains.
It's all psychology. Otto Stern used to be the keenest of open saucers and went so far as to wear a full Tux suit including headpiece wherever he went. Reader, this man was Tux. Then one day in New York his tail became hopelessly wedged in the back seat of a taxi driven by a new arrival from Turkey who spoke no English at all. Despite his sqwarks for help, Stern was unable to free himself until the meter on the cab had run up a bill for $6583.29. He's been looking for a free ride ever since, not to mention donations for medical assistance to his tail which now hangs off centre by a shameful 60 degrees.
Just my 2 cents, but sooner or later the PC world needs to break away from this fixation on legacy desktop PCs with their Heath Robinson contraptions of wires, grouchy PSUs and naked circuit boards, not to mention size and noise. The line that caught my eye in this review: "A 2.0GHz Yonah under 100% load consumes less power than an Athlon 64 X2 3800+ at idle."
Unless it is for gaming or for special and demanding applications, who needs all this muscle? A few more steps in the Yonah development line and we may be able to see PCs that are far smaller, quieter and more frugal with the juice while still packing a punch.
None of this means that the Ahtlon 64 isn't darn good, only that it is not appropriate for many computing situations. Right now, Yonah looks more like a stab at tomorrow whereas the Athlon 64 represents the apogee of yesterday.
The demise of newspapers would be a disaster for the British fish and chips trade. Imagine the humiliation of buying your supper only for your mates to see it's been wrapped in Hello! magazine or Home and Gardens.
Seriously, this is a very interesting piece. One pleasure you can get from a paper and not from the web is that of a really well-designed page or spread, and especially a layout of strong and impact-full photographs. Imagine how much would have been lost had the greats of Magnum had to publish only to the web. A really strong newspaper story can change public opinion overnight. I don't think the web can manage that, or at least not yet. Many newspapers have become so corporate that there is sometimes little connection left between the mind of a writer and those of his or her readers, and the mavericks of old aren't welcome any more. Original minds make interesting stories. If it's dull in the paper it won't be any less dull on the web.
Good Home Wanted: for our beloved bulldog, slightly overweight, mildly arthritic, not good with other dogs or anyone with long hair, attacks communists on sight (hence heart condition) but loyal to right owners. Will dance for you if fed fillet mignon. Answers to name Ballmero. Please please help as we are desperate to relocate him.
The whole thing is a farce. Microsoft aren't going to implement open formats because if they did their business would take a monster hit. At the same time, they aren't going to tell the truth and say so because they daren't risk alienating yet more people and, besides, they know which way the popular wind is blowing. What is it with these guys that no matter what happens, they simply cannot tell anything straight?
So we are subjected to this grim charade, which might just be enough to put Massachusetts and others back in their box and prevent a domino effect. Meanwhile, behind closed doors, the dirty work of persuasion continues with (metaphorically speaking, of course) a sap in one hand a a wad of $100 bills in the other.
Really, if Microsoft were Pinocchio, they'd be having to employ a train of footmen to carry their nose in front of them, and give ten minutes' warning of a sneeze so that a team could struggle down the line with a kerchief the size of a parachute. I know it's unreasonable to treat every Microsoft proposal as suspect. Alas, though, experience suggests that it usually is.
Re:Let's just have one Linux desktop
on
KDE 3.5 Released
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
There's never going to be a single Linux desktop but it's quite likely that a default one will emerge. A fair guess, which could easily turn out to be wrong, is that in a couple of years the majority of folks using Linux will find that their distro sets up Gnome for them before KDE, or at least sets up Gnome better than KDE. It only needs, say, the half dozen most popular distros to do this and the majority figure will get reached. At this point, yes, more and more developers may well decide to plump for GTK over QT-based but if they do it properly then their apps will still be perfectly good under KDE, as are Firefox or Thunderbird now.
A single DE would kill off all sorts of innovation from the Linux platform as well as be a complete bummer for a lot of folks. I make extensive use of Xfce, for example, because it runs fast on an old machine I have and strikes me as all-round darn good anyway.
Perhaps you were making this distinction between a de facto default DE emerging and there being only one DE availabe at all. And maybe the thundering herd has missed it. At any rate, I think you've been modded rather harshly.
This article is far from flattering towards Google. In some ways it is so feline that it's hard to work out where Business Week is coming from. It quotes bankers who suggest that "Googlers" are arrogant brats who are more likely to complain about the quality of the Google canteen's omelettes than they are do do hard work and hard deals.
I guess what one senses here is anger. The business establishment doesn't understand Google, hence this dismissal of anyone who isn't a numbers man as a mere "engineer". And, perhaps, there are a lot of investment houses out there playing a double game. They know what Google is currently where the money is, but they also have a burning desire to get revenge for the way Google humiliated them in its Dutch-auction style of IPO.
Google is going to have to be very, very careful with this lot. Nothing would please some of these bankers more than to make a few billion out of Google in some crock-of-shit deal before delivering them to the trashcan with "Don't ever cross Wall Street" stencilled on their brow.
Interestingly, the article doesn't mention Apple which has been a poster child in several eras now. Apple is run by, arguably, one of the world's greatest salesmen, and yet Apple also displays engineering and design excellence that's taken them to the top of the tree. I guess such marriages of engineering and business are possible, though very rare. Google has quite a challenge ahead of it.
But that's exactly my point. Everyone talks about "the potential of Google". But where is the real beef? It's no good going to a butcher and asking for a string of next week's sausages. And maybe it isn't wise to read too much into Google maps or gmail, for example. Most folks I know have never heard of either and I doubt they would use them even if they had. They have, though, heard of Windows and Word, not least because they can walk into 1001 stores and buy them.
Somewhere out there, there's probably a bunch of kids busy re-engineering Open Office (or something similar) on an Ajax basis. And if they do it well, chances are they'll be millionaires very quickly. And chances are they'll have done something that is more genuinely useful to more people than all Google's "potential". It's what you do right now, not what you say you'll do.
This is just a temporary booth that will run for only two months with only ten computers. Any one of dozens of other companies could have done something similar promoting music, cars, books, mobiles, even candy bars, etc, etc., instead of the internet. This Google venture comes over as a rather tacky and ephermeral trade/marketing stand and the Slashdot headline is completely misleading, imho.
The place is awash with stories about Google taking over the world and putting the fear of god into corporate behemoths everywhere. But take a hard look at what Google is actually doing rather than what analysts are saying. Google is a not very large company which runs the world's best search/advertising engine and has a number of frankly rather modest beta projects going. And that is all. In many ways, Google has yet to prove itself. Sooner or later, the Google boys and girls are going to have to come out with some aggressive killer moves or folks might just conclude that the story is a soap opera about California cool with, alas, little more substance than a completely crazy stock price.
These bulletins are extremely helpful in their wealth of detail but they also give a misleading impression. The impression is that "vulnerabilities" are like the weather and beyond all human control.
One way of reducing the risk of vulnerabilities is to impress on those who'd exploit them that they are highly likely to be caught and if caught will get shitcanned bigtime. I'd wager that the top 100 bad boys in Europe and the USA could be put out of action in a week with a combination of legal moves and political lobbying. It always puzzles me why the combined weight of the IT industry and all its billions are completely unable to do this. Maybe they figure that if you've already got the reputation of a dung-encrusted fly you won't sink any lower if you look the other way, sigh and pass the buck to the little guy at the end of the chain while getting on with the day job of busting grannies for drm violations and trying to patent air.
I'm grateful for these reports from SAN and others. They remind me that IT industry deserves no support at all until it is prepared to take responsibility for the consequences it creates.
I've no idea whether there is a word of truth in this article, and I guess those who know aren't saying. However, the whole thing strikes me as complete BS. Why on earth should Google want to do anything like this, as if they were running Minuteman missiles? It is really believable that Google are betting the company's future on a few dozen trucks worth millions of dollars cruising around looking for a likely lamp-post to hook up to? Many folks, including many data-centres, probably wouldn't want one of these Google containers anywhere near them. As for the arguments about sending the containers overseas, well the best most container crews could expect is a bad case of malaria and a few dozen Kalashnikov rounds through the cab before the locals turn up and confiscate the thing.
Supposing, gulp horror, Google doesn't really have much of a plan. Sure they have plans, thousands of them. But they come and go every week. Google also make a lot of opportunistic purchases and investments and launch lots of little projects. But that doesn't amount to a plan. Some of the most intelligent minds on the planet are busy trying to suss out what Google's plans may be, and so far they have come up empty.
Maybe that's because Google's most secret stash is empty.There is no masterplan. And Robert X. Cringely is busy making mischief.
Look at it this way: the cost of preserving monoply profits is 4% of those monopoly profits. Meanwhile you continue to run your monopoly the way you want and, hey, if the lawyers strike lucky you may pay less or nothing at all. It is hardly a heavy penalty considering the benefits. Even if you add up all the fines and settlements Microsoft has had to make, they still leave the company with its monopoly completely intact. Compare them to the financial benefits which have accrued to the company over the past ten years and which are likely to accrue in the next ten years. Nice money if you can get it.
Do the arithmetic. A fine of 500 million euros sounds a lot, but it is a small price to pay when you are making $12 billion in net profits per year and can drag out a case for a good three years meanwhile doing exactly what you want to. Besides, when you make allowances for investment income and inflation, that 500 million shrinks to a smaller figure.
The really important point is #3, interoperability with other platforms. Naturally MS are holding out on this one too. It's likely to become even more important if webservices take off because with their OS Microsoft can act as a choke point between every provider and every end-user.
Microsoft are acting in a predictable way. They are a monolopy, and the way to continue with your monopoly rents is to fight every case with every method available right on until the bitter end. Do the arithmetic. It's a no-brainer. Only jail-time and billions in fines would make a difference.
It's not for me. Ad-supported Windows will likely lower the value of the whole Windows brand, and make it harder to sustain prices at the top end of the market.
Ad-supported everything is probably just a fad and by next year the world and its 1001 MS cheerleaders will have moved on to something else. Is there even enough advertising money to go round? Advertising revenue is fickle and no substitute for a solid business plan. I suspect the problem is that the Windows world has yet to work out how to lower the price of software and still make enough to be profitable.
A guess is that the venerable subscription model may come back into play, but this time it will be on the basis of client/server webservices, where so many dollars a month gets you online access and the apps run back to you off a central server as well. Throw in an intelligent keyfob with your authentication/settings/files, and away we go.
Usenet is a highly practical solution, if you can set up a private or intranet server that excludes the great unwashed from signing up to it. In these circumstances, usenet is fast to the point of almost instaneous and there is no need to worry about the bad guys. Careful organization of your newsgroups and hierarchy means that users won't have to look far to find what they want - easier, perhaps, than sifting through the average, cluttered MS Outlook inbox. There is life in the old dog yet, I'd guess, especially in parts of the world where bandwidth and powerful PCs are scarce resources.
I guess webforums are sweeping all before them, but with some losses too. They can be slow, eat up bandwidth and computing power even on the client and are constantly turning up vulnerabilities in their php. OTOH, they are a good way of building up support if you're an enterprise. I suspect part of the success of Ubuntu Linux is down to the canny way they have set up their webforums and encouraged a community to flourish there. This would never have been possible with usenet.
Just my two cents but I found this article poorly written and hard to follow. So many quotes and right-on allusions: is the writer worried we'll think he hasn't got much to say? And a pervasive sense that drama and crisis are being manufactured from materials that aren't really up to it. Other writers around, notably Robert X. Cringely, cover this territory with more style (and without an obsessive interest in hyperlinks).
Maybe this guy should leave computers alone and go far away and do something completely different for a year. Great way of clearing the head. Perhaps he'd get some new perspectives on life and find he'd gotten a better writing style too.
Bob Young, who recently stepped down at Red Hat, made a very important point the other day. The present generation of lawmakers may be clueless about IT, but they are reaching retirement age now. The next generation is a lot more knowledgeable about IT having grown up with it for most of their adult lives. Over the next 5-10 years, expect lawmakers to show a more sophisticated approach to IT legislation and a lot less indulgence towards big corporations and cartels trying to pull a fast one. If this is true - a big if but not unlikely - then Searl's dire predictions are not going to happen.
People very often don't keep to speed limits whether intentionally or inadvertently. That's life. It's no use passing laws which presuppose Utopian standards of behaviour. Countries that have tried to include places like North Korea or Pol Pot's Cambodia. No thanks.
I'd suggest you ask some law enforcement folks or social workers about alcohol (or drug) abuse before assuming that the only person who gets harmed is the user. That could not be further from the truth.
Are you a policeman, then, or merely firming up your views for a run at a seat in Parliament?You sound like ideal material for a position in government.
Every Western country is facing Big Brother issues. However, I wonder if the UK has created its own issue here: whether it is wise or moral to criminalize huge numbers of the population with the aim of raising extra revenue for the government. Few in the UK would argue that the present system of speed cameras (they are called Gatso cameras) is designed for much else other than making money for the state.
I guess if a government goes about giving very large numbers of otherwise law-abiding citizens a criminal record they should not expect much more than cynicism when it comes to other social problems. We are then all the losers.
A by-product of the current obsession with safety is that enormous sums have to be spent on repairing emergency vehicles whose suspension is wrecked going over speed bumps in urban areas. In addition, more acute cases die because it takes longer for an ambulance to get them to hospital and the ride there is bumpy to say the least. It might even turn out that the safety obsession kills more people than it is intended to save.
Meanwhile, new licensing laws in the UK permitting the sale of alcohol 24/7 promise many mores deaths from alcohol abuse and its fallout. Liver disease from alcohol abuse among those under 30 is several hundred per cent higher than it was even twenty years ago. Apparently it's OK to drink yourself to death in the UK, but woe betide you if you get in an automobile stone cold sober.
Yes, that's a darn good way of looking at it. Red Hat don't do so badly in terms of net income per employee, though, coming around 16th in the field. I agree that the Hitachi figure looks duff, too.
It's interesting to see that they've managed this with less than 1000 employees. Only two others in the list are comparable in this respect. Plenty of other companies on the list have thousands or tens or thousands of employees.
Red Hat's stock is on an astronomical PE ratio, higher even than Google's. It's pretty instructive comparing the PE ratio to, say, Novell's which is about a tenth as high.
So, I guess it's clear the financial market is very much buying the line that "Red Hat is Linux", perhaps much more than was the case a year or two ago. Nice news if you're Red Hat. Not so nice for anyone else.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, I expect you're an American and are having trouble finding Borneo on a map while whining about the high price of gas for your 8 miles to the gallon SUV. Reading Slashdot is a great way to discover that most Americans appear to know nothing of the world outside the USA other than how to bomb it.
It looks like it's taking a dump on camera, which I guess is how many of us might feel if we had to live in a forest "owned" by businessmen, generals and politicians who are plundering it as fast as they can launder and bank their ill-gotten gains.
When they said "Put a tiger in your tank" I didn't think they meant it literally.
It's all psychology. Otto Stern used to be the keenest of open saucers and went so far as to wear a full Tux suit including headpiece wherever he went. Reader, this man was Tux. Then one day in New York his tail became hopelessly wedged in the back seat of a taxi driven by a new arrival from Turkey who spoke no English at all. Despite his sqwarks for help, Stern was unable to free himself until the meter on the cab had run up a bill for $6583.29. He's been looking for a free ride ever since, not to mention donations for medical assistance to his tail which now hangs off centre by a shameful 60 degrees.
Just my 2 cents, but sooner or later the PC world needs to break away from this fixation on legacy desktop PCs with their Heath Robinson contraptions of wires, grouchy PSUs and naked circuit boards, not to mention size and noise. The line that caught my eye in this review: "A 2.0GHz Yonah under 100% load consumes less power than an Athlon 64 X2 3800+ at idle."
Unless it is for gaming or for special and demanding applications, who needs all this muscle? A few more steps in the Yonah development line and we may be able to see PCs that are far smaller, quieter and more frugal with the juice while still packing a punch.
None of this means that the Ahtlon 64 isn't darn good, only that it is not appropriate for many computing situations. Right now, Yonah looks more like a stab at tomorrow whereas the Athlon 64 represents the apogee of yesterday.
The demise of newspapers would be a disaster for the British fish and chips trade. Imagine the humiliation of buying your supper only for your mates to see it's been wrapped in Hello! magazine or Home and Gardens.
Seriously, this is a very interesting piece. One pleasure you can get from a paper and not from the web is that of a really well-designed page or spread, and especially a layout of strong and impact-full photographs. Imagine how much would have been lost had the greats of Magnum had to publish only to the web. A really strong newspaper story can change public opinion overnight. I don't think the web can manage that, or at least not yet. Many newspapers have become so corporate that there is sometimes little connection left between the mind of a writer and those of his or her readers, and the mavericks of old aren't welcome any more. Original minds make interesting stories. If it's dull in the paper it won't be any less dull on the web.
Good Home Wanted: for our beloved bulldog, slightly overweight, mildly arthritic, not good with other dogs or anyone with long hair, attacks communists on sight (hence heart condition) but loyal to right owners. Will dance for you if fed fillet mignon. Answers to name Ballmero. Please please help as we are desperate to relocate him.
The whole thing is a farce. Microsoft aren't going to implement open formats because if they did their business would take a monster hit. At the same time, they aren't going to tell the truth and say so because they daren't risk alienating yet more people and, besides, they know which way the popular wind is blowing. What is it with these guys that no matter what happens, they simply cannot tell anything straight?
So we are subjected to this grim charade, which might just be enough to put Massachusetts and others back in their box and prevent a domino effect. Meanwhile, behind closed doors, the dirty work of persuasion continues with (metaphorically speaking, of course) a sap in one hand a a wad of $100 bills in the other.
Really, if Microsoft were Pinocchio, they'd be having to employ a train of footmen to carry their nose in front of them, and give ten minutes' warning of a sneeze so that a team could struggle down the line with a kerchief the size of a parachute. I know it's unreasonable to treat every Microsoft proposal as suspect. Alas, though, experience suggests that it usually is.
There's never going to be a single Linux desktop but it's quite likely that a default one will emerge. A fair guess, which could easily turn out to be wrong, is that in a couple of years the majority of folks using Linux will find that their distro sets up Gnome for them before KDE, or at least sets up Gnome better than KDE. It only needs, say, the half dozen most popular distros to do this and the majority figure will get reached. At this point, yes, more and more developers may well decide to plump for GTK over QT-based but if they do it properly then their apps will still be perfectly good under KDE, as are Firefox or Thunderbird now.
A single DE would kill off all sorts of innovation from the Linux platform as well as be a complete bummer for a lot of folks. I make extensive use of Xfce, for example, because it runs fast on an old machine I have and strikes me as all-round darn good anyway.
Perhaps you were making this distinction between a de facto default DE emerging and there being only one DE availabe at all. And maybe the thundering herd has missed it. At any rate, I think you've been modded rather harshly.
This article is far from flattering towards Google. In some ways it is so feline that it's hard to work out where Business Week is coming from. It quotes bankers who suggest that "Googlers" are arrogant brats who are more likely to complain about the quality of the Google canteen's omelettes than they are do do hard work and hard deals.
I guess what one senses here is anger. The business establishment doesn't understand Google, hence this dismissal of anyone who isn't a numbers man as a mere "engineer". And, perhaps, there are a lot of investment houses out there playing a double game. They know what Google is currently where the money is, but they also have a burning desire to get revenge for the way Google humiliated them in its Dutch-auction style of IPO.
Google is going to have to be very, very careful with this lot. Nothing would please some of these bankers more than to make a few billion out of Google in some crock-of-shit deal before delivering them to the trashcan with "Don't ever cross Wall Street" stencilled on their brow.
Interestingly, the article doesn't mention Apple which has been a poster child in several eras now. Apple is run by, arguably, one of the world's greatest salesmen, and yet Apple also displays engineering and design excellence that's taken them to the top of the tree. I guess such marriages of engineering and business are possible, though very rare. Google has quite a challenge ahead of it.
But that's exactly my point. Everyone talks about "the potential of Google". But where is the real beef? It's no good going to a butcher and asking for a string of next week's sausages. And maybe it isn't wise to read too much into Google maps or gmail, for example. Most folks I know have never heard of either and I doubt they would use them even if they had. They have, though, heard of Windows and Word, not least because they can walk into 1001 stores and buy them.
Somewhere out there, there's probably a bunch of kids busy re-engineering Open Office (or something similar) on an Ajax basis. And if they do it well, chances are they'll be millionaires very quickly. And chances are they'll have done something that is more genuinely useful to more people than all Google's "potential". It's what you do right now, not what you say you'll do.
He's only an analyst. Be gentle with him. He probably thinks everyone gets a $250,000 Christmas bonus.
This is just a temporary booth that will run for only two months with only ten computers. Any one of dozens of other companies could have done something similar promoting music, cars, books, mobiles, even candy bars, etc, etc., instead of the internet. This Google venture comes over as a rather tacky and ephermeral trade/marketing stand and the Slashdot headline is completely misleading, imho.
The place is awash with stories about Google taking over the world and putting the fear of god into corporate behemoths everywhere. But take a hard look at what Google is actually doing rather than what analysts are saying. Google is a not very large company which runs the world's best search/advertising engine and has a number of frankly rather modest beta projects going. And that is all. In many ways, Google has yet to prove itself. Sooner or later, the Google boys and girls are going to have to come out with some aggressive killer moves or folks might just conclude that the story is a soap opera about California cool with, alas, little more substance than a completely crazy stock price.
These bulletins are extremely helpful in their wealth of detail but they also give a misleading impression. The impression is that "vulnerabilities" are like the weather and beyond all human control.
One way of reducing the risk of vulnerabilities is to impress on those who'd exploit them that they are highly likely to be caught and if caught will get shitcanned bigtime. I'd wager that the top 100 bad boys in Europe and the USA could be put out of action in a week with a combination of legal moves and political lobbying. It always puzzles me why the combined weight of the IT industry and all its billions are completely unable to do this. Maybe they figure that if you've already got the reputation of a dung-encrusted fly you won't sink any lower if you look the other way, sigh and pass the buck to the little guy at the end of the chain while getting on with the day job of busting grannies for drm violations and trying to patent air.
I'm grateful for these reports from SAN and others. They remind me that IT industry deserves no support at all until it is prepared to take responsibility for the consequences it creates.
I've no idea whether there is a word of truth in this article, and I guess those who know aren't saying. However, the whole thing strikes me as complete BS. Why on earth should Google want to do anything like this, as if they were running Minuteman missiles? It is really believable that Google are betting the company's future on a few dozen trucks worth millions of dollars cruising around looking for a likely lamp-post to hook up to? Many folks, including many data-centres, probably wouldn't want one of these Google containers anywhere near them. As for the arguments about sending the containers overseas, well the best most container crews could expect is a bad case of malaria and a few dozen Kalashnikov rounds through the cab before the locals turn up and confiscate the thing.
Supposing, gulp horror, Google doesn't really have much of a plan. Sure they have plans, thousands of them. But they come and go every week. Google also make a lot of opportunistic purchases and investments and launch lots of little projects. But that doesn't amount to a plan. Some of the most intelligent minds on the planet are busy trying to suss out what Google's plans may be, and so far they have come up empty.
Maybe that's because Google's most secret stash is empty.There is no masterplan. And Robert X. Cringely is busy making mischief.
Look at it this way: the cost of preserving monoply profits is 4% of those monopoly profits. Meanwhile you continue to run your monopoly the way you want and, hey, if the lawyers strike lucky you may pay less or nothing at all. It is hardly a heavy penalty considering the benefits. Even if you add up all the fines and settlements Microsoft has had to make, they still leave the company with its monopoly completely intact. Compare them to the financial benefits which have accrued to the company over the past ten years and which are likely to accrue in the next ten years. Nice money if you can get it.
Do the arithmetic. A fine of 500 million euros sounds a lot, but it is a small price to pay when you are making $12 billion in net profits per year and can drag out a case for a good three years meanwhile doing exactly what you want to. Besides, when you make allowances for investment income and inflation, that 500 million shrinks to a smaller figure.
The really important point is #3, interoperability with other platforms. Naturally MS are holding out on this one too. It's likely to become even more important if webservices take off because with their OS Microsoft can act as a choke point between every provider and every end-user.
Microsoft are acting in a predictable way. They are a monolopy, and the way to continue with your monopoly rents is to fight every case with every method available right on until the bitter end. Do the arithmetic. It's a no-brainer. Only jail-time and billions in fines would make a difference.
It's not for me. Ad-supported Windows will likely lower the value of the whole Windows brand, and make it harder to sustain prices at the top end of the market.
Ad-supported everything is probably just a fad and by next year the world and its 1001 MS cheerleaders will have moved on to something else. Is there even enough advertising money to go round? Advertising revenue is fickle and no substitute for a solid business plan. I suspect the problem is that the Windows world has yet to work out how to lower the price of software and still make enough to be profitable.
A guess is that the venerable subscription model may come back into play, but this time it will be on the basis of client/server webservices, where so many dollars a month gets you online access and the apps run back to you off a central server as well. Throw in an intelligent keyfob with your authentication/settings/files, and away we go.
Usenet is a highly practical solution, if you can set up a private or intranet server that excludes the great unwashed from signing up to it. In these circumstances, usenet is fast to the point of almost instaneous and there is no need to worry about the bad guys. Careful organization of your newsgroups and hierarchy means that users won't have to look far to find what they want - easier, perhaps, than sifting through the average, cluttered MS Outlook inbox. There is life in the old dog yet, I'd guess, especially in parts of the world where bandwidth and powerful PCs are scarce resources.
I guess webforums are sweeping all before them, but with some losses too. They can be slow, eat up bandwidth and computing power even on the client and are constantly turning up vulnerabilities in their php. OTOH, they are a good way of building up support if you're an enterprise. I suspect part of the success of Ubuntu Linux is down to the canny way they have set up their webforums and encouraged a community to flourish there. This would never have been possible with usenet.
Just my two cents but I found this article poorly written and hard to follow. So many quotes and right-on allusions: is the writer worried we'll think he hasn't got much to say? And a pervasive sense that drama and crisis are being manufactured from materials that aren't really up to it. Other writers around, notably Robert X. Cringely, cover this territory with more style (and without an obsessive interest in hyperlinks).
Maybe this guy should leave computers alone and go far away and do something completely different for a year. Great way of clearing the head. Perhaps he'd get some new perspectives on life and find he'd gotten a better writing style too.
Bob Young, who recently stepped down at Red Hat, made a very important point the other day. The present generation of lawmakers may be clueless about IT, but they are reaching retirement age now. The next generation is a lot more knowledgeable about IT having grown up with it for most of their adult lives. Over the next 5-10 years, expect lawmakers to show a more sophisticated approach to IT legislation and a lot less indulgence towards big corporations and cartels trying to pull a fast one. If this is true - a big if but not unlikely - then Searl's dire predictions are not going to happen.
People very often don't keep to speed limits whether intentionally or inadvertently. That's life. It's no use passing laws which presuppose Utopian standards of behaviour. Countries that have tried to include places like North Korea or Pol Pot's Cambodia. No thanks.
I'd suggest you ask some law enforcement folks or social workers about alcohol (or drug) abuse before assuming that the only person who gets harmed is the user. That could not be further from the truth.
Are you a policeman, then, or merely firming up your views for a run at a seat in Parliament?You sound like ideal material for a position in government.
Every Western country is facing Big Brother issues. However, I wonder if the UK has created its own issue here: whether it is wise or moral to criminalize huge numbers of the population with the aim of raising extra revenue for the government. Few in the UK would argue that the present system of speed cameras (they are called Gatso cameras) is designed for much else other than making money for the state.
I guess if a government goes about giving very large numbers of otherwise law-abiding citizens a criminal record they should not expect much more than cynicism when it comes to other social problems. We are then all the losers.
A by-product of the current obsession with safety is that enormous sums have to be spent on repairing emergency vehicles whose suspension is wrecked going over speed bumps in urban areas. In addition, more acute cases die because it takes longer for an ambulance to get them to hospital and the ride there is bumpy to say the least. It might even turn out that the safety obsession kills more people than it is intended to save.
Meanwhile, new licensing laws in the UK permitting the sale of alcohol 24/7 promise many mores deaths from alcohol abuse and its fallout. Liver disease from alcohol abuse among those under 30 is several hundred per cent higher than it was even twenty years ago. Apparently it's OK to drink yourself to death in the UK, but woe betide you if you get in an automobile stone cold sober.
Yes, that's a darn good way of looking at it. Red Hat don't do so badly in terms of net income per employee, though, coming around 16th in the field. I agree that the Hitachi figure looks duff, too.
It's interesting to see that they've managed this with less than 1000 employees. Only two others in the list are comparable in this respect. Plenty of other companies on the list have thousands or tens or thousands of employees.
Red Hat's stock is on an astronomical PE ratio, higher even than Google's. It's pretty instructive comparing the PE ratio to, say, Novell's which is about a tenth as high.
So, I guess it's clear the financial market is very much buying the line that "Red Hat is Linux", perhaps much more than was the case a year or two ago. Nice news if you're Red Hat. Not so nice for anyone else.