Mandrake is more of a "user friendly" distro then a performance optimized distribution. Someone might add Mandrake to the list, but it's not as tightly configured as say Gentoo and I can't imagine what purpose it would be to add it to the competition except for just representation.
It's a ridiculous concept really, the reasons email has become successful to begin with is that it's fast and free. If you charge for email, people will just move over to instant messengers or other systems. And how do you enforce charging people who you may or may not be able to track, the proposal to charge for spam based on the reciever's choice is absolutely ridiculous.
Well, the way I look at it is that they are trying to make the "Official" release more stable though it will probably have the downside of being "older" technology then in newer distro's. The Official version will be availble for public download shortly after it's available to club members so I don't see this as a big deal.
With regards to the "renaming beta", the community version will likely be "as tested" as their recently releases which many have complained have some stability problems (I personally have noticed any) and the "official" version is aimed to be a rock solid release. That's at least what I am interpreting. This doesn't mean the community release is a beta, it's just not going to be as throughly tested as the "official" version will be. I also assume the official version will have extra software (ala the power pack).
Well, the community version of Mandrake is just an early build of the release. Unlike Red Hat, Mandrake is actually releasing the "official" version for public download, as it's stated "after a short delay, Mandrake Linux 10.0 Official Download Edition will be made available on public FTP mirrors". This is a signficiant difference from Red Hat's business model.
This isn't really new, outside of the changing of the "cooker" system all of this was announced earlier. Anyway, outside of faster updates the only major difference between the community version and the regular version of Mandrake appears to just be extra software bundled with the regular version. I don't see the community release as a "beta" exactly as a lot of others on this thread seem to percieve it as.
Microsoft, certainly, is in a much stronger position than Sega (in reference to the early Dreamcast launch). The Xbox's buzz factor is on the rise - and will soar higher if the company opts for a $99 price tag.
FINANCIALLY Microsoft is in stronger position then Sega was, otherwise not really. From a support and development perspective Sega had a lot of large third party companies (particularly Japanese third parties) supporting the Dreamcast. Additionally, the Xbox buzz factor isn't that "hot" either. The system is in a tight race in the US and Europe with Nintendo over second place in those markets (while a distant third worldwide) and is for all intents and purposes dead in the all important Japanese market. Microsoft is also taking a signficant loss on every Xbox system they sell which has not been recouped by game and licensed peripheral sales.
There are also questions around the gaming industry on the retail side of the industry about potentially inflated sales numbers already from Microsofts camp. Microsoft refurbishes their own used systems and resells them to retailers such as EBgames, Gamestop and GameCrazy. This differs from Nintendo and Sony's approach in which "refurbished" systems are handled by the companies that distribute them, not by the manufacturer. Former Microsoft reps have leaked the word out that Microsoft was counting refurb systems sales as new sales until recently, meaning that many Xbox systems were listed as being sold twice.
There are also questions about inflated Xbox live numbers as many of the Xbox live subscribers are on free subscriptions that come with software rather then paying subscribers.
With regards to the Xbox 2/next coming out in 2005, I believe that is in fact a possibility. But the Xbox being dropped to 99.99 in the imminent future (or before Sony does so) seems highly unlikely. Microsoft is already taking a much bigger loss on their hardware then Sony. It's hard to imagine them running up an even deeper deficeit merely to move into a distant second place in the US and Europe.
It's good to hear Mandrake is doing well, it's been my preffered distribution since version 7.0 or so.
A lot of people are still under the impression that Mandrake is just a Red Hat clone with KDE as the default WM but the distribution has come a long way since then. It has a nice installer and a lot of nice tools, good hardware detection and unlike most desktop oriented distro's, it isn't crippled in any way.
Another ridiculously bad prediction in his article (unrelated to OSS but I'm sure willl be fascinating to slashdotters) is his final bold claim of "To repeat last year's prediction: "In 2004, Nintendo will have followed Sega's lead by exiting the console business." In 2004, it will."
This guy obviously doesn't pay much attention to any sales numbers outside the US where Nintendo is well ahead of Microsoft in terms of console sales worldwide. In fact Nintendo was close to getting caught up with MS in North America but a shortage of Zelda bundle Game Cube's towards the late stages of the holiday season caused a slight drop in sales.
He's just trying to make a lot of US corporate friendly predictions get people talking, he either doesn't believe what he is saying or is simply looking for attention. A lot of it is pretty ridiculous.
It's not necessarily the fact that they are trying to improve their product that is the problem, the problem is that they are trying to use their monopoly market share to usurp existing industry standards with their own proprietary standards that will only run on their software.
If the actual intention of Microsoft was to improve the standard or the market that would be one thing, but the intention is obviously to simply make their products as incompatible as possible with everything else once they have the market lead and use their tremendous market share in other sects of the industry to hold it in place.
My complaint isn't that they move other software out, my complaint is that they try to change standards to lock in end users which is a violation of their anti-trust settlements. It's not just something like this, it's things like their MS-Integrated BIOS the list goes on and on.
There's always Mandrake, whatever will become of Fedora and other easy to use, easy to install distro's out there. For people running Red Hat as a desktop machine Mandrake I think is the easiest switch over since it's RPM based, easy to install and very similar in general to using Red Hat as a desktop. I see Mandrake being an easy choice for Red hat users to convert over to, but then again I'm biased, I've been using Mandrake for years.
It's Yahoo's chat network and system and I don't see the big deal if they lock out third party clients provided people are still able to use their service. With the Unix versions of Yahoo! Messenger continuing to be updated and ported to various platforms they aren't leaving many users behind. If people want to use Yahoo's chat services there is a version of the client available for nearly everyplatform or at least a way you can use the source file and try to make one, for the Unix clients they even have a "Yahoo! Group" to discuss the development of the client.
My issue is with Microsoft who only produces Windows and Mac versions of their messenger client, by locking out third party clients they effectively lock out everyone not using recent versions of their (or Apple who they have a stake in) proprietary OS from their network. I use GAIM but only for MSN messenger since I primarily use Linux as a desktop.
With Yahoo! at least they provide a client for nearly every platform and have a fairly open forum in their Ymessenger Yahoo! group to discuss development or make requests, with Microsoft that isn't at all the case.
The Unix builds of Yahoo! Messenger also give off the discontinuation message, I emailed Yahoo! Unix Messenger Support about it last week with no reply.
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Mandrake is more of a "user friendly" distro then a performance optimized distribution. Someone might add Mandrake to the list, but it's not as tightly configured as say Gentoo and I can't imagine what purpose it would be to add it to the competition except for just representation.
Will they be benchmarking database performance, GCC compiling speed, I took at look at the methodology page and it wasn't particularly specific.
It's a ridiculous concept really, the reasons email has become successful to begin with is that it's fast and free. If you charge for email, people will just move over to instant messengers or other systems. And how do you enforce charging people who you may or may not be able to track, the proposal to charge for spam based on the reciever's choice is absolutely ridiculous.
Well, the way I look at it is that they are trying to make the "Official" release more stable though it will probably have the downside of being "older" technology then in newer distro's. The Official version will be availble for public download shortly after it's available to club members so I don't see this as a big deal. With regards to the "renaming beta", the community version will likely be "as tested" as their recently releases which many have complained have some stability problems (I personally have noticed any) and the "official" version is aimed to be a rock solid release. That's at least what I am interpreting. This doesn't mean the community release is a beta, it's just not going to be as throughly tested as the "official" version will be. I also assume the official version will have extra software (ala the power pack).
Well, the community version of Mandrake is just an early build of the release. Unlike Red Hat, Mandrake is actually releasing the "official" version for public download, as it's stated "after a short delay, Mandrake Linux 10.0 Official Download Edition will be made available on public FTP mirrors". This is a signficiant difference from Red Hat's business model.
This isn't really new, outside of the changing of the "cooker" system all of this was announced earlier. Anyway, outside of faster updates the only major difference between the community version and the regular version of Mandrake appears to just be extra software bundled with the regular version. I don't see the community release as a "beta" exactly as a lot of others on this thread seem to percieve it as.
"If you're a bad guy and you want to frustrate law enforcement, use a Mac.'"
Br> What an advertising campaign that would be eh?
Microsoft, certainly, is in a much stronger position than Sega (in reference to the early Dreamcast launch). The Xbox's buzz factor is on the rise - and will soar higher if the company opts for a $99 price tag.
FINANCIALLY Microsoft is in stronger position then Sega was, otherwise not really. From a support and development perspective Sega had a lot of large third party companies (particularly Japanese third parties) supporting the Dreamcast. Additionally, the Xbox buzz factor isn't that "hot" either. The system is in a tight race in the US and Europe with Nintendo over second place in those markets (while a distant third worldwide) and is for all intents and purposes dead in the all important Japanese market. Microsoft is also taking a signficant loss on every Xbox system they sell which has not been recouped by game and licensed peripheral sales.
There are also questions around the gaming industry on the retail side of the industry about potentially inflated sales numbers already from Microsofts camp. Microsoft refurbishes their own used systems and resells them to retailers such as EBgames, Gamestop and GameCrazy. This differs from Nintendo and Sony's approach in which "refurbished" systems are handled by the companies that distribute them, not by the manufacturer. Former Microsoft reps have leaked the word out that Microsoft was counting refurb systems sales as new sales until recently, meaning that many Xbox systems were listed as being sold twice.
There are also questions about inflated Xbox live numbers as many of the Xbox live subscribers are on free subscriptions that come with software rather then paying subscribers.
With regards to the Xbox 2/next coming out in 2005, I believe that is in fact a possibility. But the Xbox being dropped to 99.99 in the imminent future (or before Sony does so) seems highly unlikely. Microsoft is already taking a much bigger loss on their hardware then Sony. It's hard to imagine them running up an even deeper deficeit merely to move into a distant second place in the US and Europe.
It's good to hear Mandrake is doing well, it's been my preffered distribution since version 7.0 or so. A lot of people are still under the impression that Mandrake is just a Red Hat clone with KDE as the default WM but the distribution has come a long way since then. It has a nice installer and a lot of nice tools, good hardware detection and unlike most desktop oriented distro's, it isn't crippled in any way.
Another ridiculously bad prediction in his article (unrelated to OSS but I'm sure willl be fascinating to slashdotters) is his final bold claim of "To repeat last year's prediction: "In 2004, Nintendo will have followed Sega's lead by exiting the console business." In 2004, it will." This guy obviously doesn't pay much attention to any sales numbers outside the US where Nintendo is well ahead of Microsoft in terms of console sales worldwide. In fact Nintendo was close to getting caught up with MS in North America but a shortage of Zelda bundle Game Cube's towards the late stages of the holiday season caused a slight drop in sales. He's just trying to make a lot of US corporate friendly predictions get people talking, he either doesn't believe what he is saying or is simply looking for attention. A lot of it is pretty ridiculous.
It's not necessarily the fact that they are trying to improve their product that is the problem, the problem is that they are trying to use their monopoly market share to usurp existing industry standards with their own proprietary standards that will only run on their software. If the actual intention of Microsoft was to improve the standard or the market that would be one thing, but the intention is obviously to simply make their products as incompatible as possible with everything else once they have the market lead and use their tremendous market share in other sects of the industry to hold it in place. My complaint isn't that they move other software out, my complaint is that they try to change standards to lock in end users which is a violation of their anti-trust settlements. It's not just something like this, it's things like their MS-Integrated BIOS the list goes on and on.
There's always Mandrake, whatever will become of Fedora and other easy to use, easy to install distro's out there. For people running Red Hat as a desktop machine Mandrake I think is the easiest switch over since it's RPM based, easy to install and very similar in general to using Red Hat as a desktop. I see Mandrake being an easy choice for Red hat users to convert over to, but then again I'm biased, I've been using Mandrake for years.
It's Yahoo's chat network and system and I don't see the big deal if they lock out third party clients provided people are still able to use their service. With the Unix versions of Yahoo! Messenger continuing to be updated and ported to various platforms they aren't leaving many users behind. If people want to use Yahoo's chat services there is a version of the client available for nearly everyplatform or at least a way you can use the source file and try to make one, for the Unix clients they even have a "Yahoo! Group" to discuss the development of the client. My issue is with Microsoft who only produces Windows and Mac versions of their messenger client, by locking out third party clients they effectively lock out everyone not using recent versions of their (or Apple who they have a stake in) proprietary OS from their network. I use GAIM but only for MSN messenger since I primarily use Linux as a desktop. With Yahoo! at least they provide a client for nearly every platform and have a fairly open forum in their Ymessenger Yahoo! group to discuss development or make requests, with Microsoft that isn't at all the case.
The Unix builds of Yahoo! Messenger also give off the discontinuation message, I emailed Yahoo! Unix Messenger Support about it last week with no reply.