Usability testing tends to be primarily focused on GUI desktop applications. Right there you pretty much nix most open src projects. However, there are quite a few open source desktop apps. Mozilla for example doesn't do any formal usability testing, although the a good majority of the bugs submitted are "enhancements" of the usability nature. I'd imagine that during Star Office's proprietary days under Sun and StarDivision, that some sort of usability testing was performed. However, I doubt that any is currently happening for Open Office. The problem is that focus groups and usability tests cost money. I wonder if groups like Ximian are doing this sort of thing?
Moore's Law: CPU capacity shall double every 18-24 months.
Ammendment I: Bus speed shall pretty much stay dormant, until some asshole decides to get off his ass and do something about it.
Ammendment II: Tape as a hard storage solution will stick around like Herpes. Sure some gerks at Livermoore will screw around with rubies and diamonds, but the reality is one upgrade of the 8-track after another.
Ammendment III: A hard drive's fragility will double every 18-24 months. Shit, the instructions on the last hard drive I got said, "Do not breathe in room with hard drive before installation."
Ammendment IV: The average number of patches required between releases of software shall double every 18-24 months.
Ammendment V: The number of hours it takes you to turn of the stupid marketeering features of the new windows Office release, like auto-capitalizer, will double every 18-24 months.
Ammendment VI: (added by Microsoft recently) The ammount of money you pay us for software you have to buy will now double every 18-24 months.
Ammendment VII: The number of months before Mozilla 1.0 is released doubles every 18-24 months.
Ammendment VIII: The number of people who use emacs and the number of people who use vi hasn't changed since 1992 and may become one of the constants of physics (like the speed of light).
Ammendment IX: The editorial skills of the/. editors will deminish by %50 every 18-24 months.
Ammendment X: The number of stupid patents issued shall double every 18-24 months.
Ammendment XI: The number of RAID variations shall double every 18-24 months and the number of different labels for the same variation shall also double every 18-24 months.
Ammendment XII: The chances of a/. front page posting entitled, "Goatsex and You" shall dimminish by %50 every 18-24 months.
The Planck time is the time it would take a photon travelling at the speed of light to across a distance equal to the Planck length. This is the 'quantum of time', the smallest measurement of time that has any meaning, and is equal to 10^-43 seconds, under the current speculation as to the Planck Length. However, certain revalations regarding the size of certain extra-dimensions has put the Planck Length into a spin. (it could be considerably larger and could explain why gravity is such a seemingly weak force).
But, all of this is irrelevant, because there is no limit on how quickly we can know a single fact, because we can determine a theoretical infinite number of facts from a single query with quantum computing.
First off, my guess is that/. is running asci on the servers, which is fair considering the site is in English. Second, if they were running unicode on the servers, they would have to update their lameness-filters significantly to deal with the goatsex problem.
Intelligent Commentary posted on/. !!! Somebody knows what they are talking about. Shutdown the servers. MySQL must be acting up again! ECC failure! The CPU is running too hot! Drive failure! Katz must be out sick!
I've been wanted to start game project for a worldwide Illuminati multiplayer game, but I had a hard time tracking down free map vector data to base the game from. This sounds like a potential spot. The main screen of the game was a 3D view of the globe, so you can see how it was important. I've been waiting for something like this for a while now.
Minsky has the best approach. Throw all of the approaches into the same box. However, its a shame that he is such a losey speaker. All of the important information in his speach could have been put into about six sentences.
I agree with you on efficiency, hybrid cars, better technologies. Let me draw a line between conservation from efficeincy and conservation from restraint. I do not believe in the latter. I think we need to increase the available energy per/person as a society. However, if energy taxes, tax credits, and international treaties will make us use that energy more efficiently, I am for it.
The real problem is that we are incredibly dependant on fossil fuels. To claim, that conservation by restraint (or frankly even by efficeincy) will reverse the problem in the atmosphere is without basis (unless drastic, draconian measures were taken, i.e. 65-70% global reductions). Even with the Kyoto agreement, C02 levels would be expected to double the levels of 1995 between 2050-2070. Cars only produce 1/3 of the C02. Even if we could move all cars and trucks to electric-hybrids, the resulting CO2 levels would only be about 15%. That would still get us on track for a C02 doubling this century.
I agree with you that our leadership lacks the political balls to really address this issue. It would take a benevolant dictator I think to really address this issue. The first issue that needs to be addressed is the nuclear power issue. What is more dangerous? Radioactive Waste or a 10 foot sea level increase. Nuclear of course is no where close to a complete answer. It is expensive, and not appropriate for the third world. We need a massive (manhattan project + Apollo + WWII + Genome) international collition of scientists. Yank all of those engineers in Russia and the US working on the space program, all those engineers working on free software, all of the engineers working on whatever, and get them in a room to work this issue out. We spend 6% of the US government's budget on an orbiting vegitable garden (US international space station). The US gov spends less than 0.01% researching alternative energies. Time to let that bucket of useless crap fall into the ocean and put all of those people to work doing something productive (except for their budget managers who are fired).
The only realistic solution that you are suggesting is cutting back on energy consumption drastically. Solar Panels simply can't meet the energy needs of the world. Gasoline is an amazing thing. It really is quite incredible. It contains an impressive amount of chemical energy for its weight. There is nothing to replace it. Sure battery powered cars (less efficient than gas turbines) could concentrate production to the power plants which burn 70% more efficient. However, that is only fraction of the emissions. You will still end up with the emissions. The Kyoto Agreement was a fraud. "Decrease Carbon Emissions for 1st world (only) countries to 5% below 1992 levels)." You think that will do anything to slow down emissions? It is a triffling. It doesnt address emerging nations, where the majority of the future coal and oil will be burned (China and India). The Global Effort should be "FIND A NEW SOURCE OF ENERGY THAT IS A GOOD REPLACEMENT FOR FOSSIL FUELS." I say go with fission until fusion is ready, but they can't even agree to cut greenhouse emissions by 5%, how will they agree to deal with nuclear waste?
Nothing against Darwin or BSD but those are great server platforms. While X-windows is good for some things, what I really want, is a *nix desktop that I can run MS Office and Internet Explorer on. Call me crazy, but I'm sick of the dual boot, because some jack ass sends me an Excel doc with a graph or something in it that I can read with Star Office. OS-X looks like it can do this. I just wish Apple had the incentive to port all of OS-X to various archs. That way, MS-Office would also be ported.
I guess the problem that I have with OS-X is that the latest hardware it runs on is the G4. I can run OpenBSD on dozens of architectures; dido linux. Windows is more limited, but at least the hardware is open. I can build my own intel box for pretty cheap. Could I do the same with an architecture that supports Mac OS-X? If not, when. I hear they are porting Darwin to x86, when are they going to port the whole package over?
You could author a simple script to do that. The problem is that some cookies you probably want to live. For example, I want my NYTimes cookie to live, so I dont have to login all of the time. Same with my slashdot cookie. I dont care if the NYtimes tracks my demo-data: He logins in, he views the front page, he views the tech page, he views the business page, he views the science page, he never clicks on an add. However, I don't want some pr0n site tracking my movements, nor some crappy software company that's going to correlate me with an email address that I registered to buy something with.
If I were designing a browser, I would have a cookie monitoring window, which would log cookie activity. One could author filtration scripts to block certain domains from cookie access, manually delete cookies from the monitor window, etc.
What is a PC? What is a computer? Will my router have to have one? Give me a break. This is exactly the kind of law that starts with the best of intentions and ends up like that annoying seat belt alarm that goes off when you put your briefcase on the passanger seat.
While greenhouse energy taxes are interesting, (certainly for gasoline), they wont really address the problem. China is not going to cut back or levy taxes on greenhouse gasses. What these clowns dont want to face is the solution. They don't even try and present one, because the solutions are just as horrific as there predicitons. The Kyoto agreement (which is pretty much dead) would have cut emissions by a wapping 5.2% by 2012. Like that is going to do shit. The emissions would still be climing at alarming rates. All of this conservation, cut back, emission crap is a total waste of time, unless we shut off the power for about 1/2 the world, which frankly would be worse than a 10 foot sea level rise.
So, the bottom line is that we need alternative energy sources and we need them now. Biofuels dont even come close (Literally all of the farmable land on the Earth would have to be deditcated to corn just to produce the current world energy need.) Solar, Wind and Geothermal just dont make enough juice. Fusion is too far out. What is left.
Well Nuclear stands a chance, but people are too much of a bunch of pussies to use it. So I'll tell you what the solution will be. Let the fucking sealevels rise. I want my car. I want my heat. I want my oil. We went to Kuwate with a couple of Aircraft carrieries and dropped more explosives on that psycho in Iraq than we used in all of WWII. Do you think we will just turn off our cars. Shut off the lights? No, we'll keep them on. And so will the Chineese. Millions will die as a result. But Millions would die if you shut the power off too. So either come up will a new source of power, or buy some land on a hilltop.
Fortan. They say it still outcranks C in some areas if you can believe it. (I don't)
Re:Consider the limitations
on
PS2 As PC
·
· Score: 2
Game Cartridges used to have additional hardware, such as memory, to enhance the system resources. It was a hack to distribute some of the cost of the console to the game developers.
Microsoft's dominance in the desktop market has nothing to do with hardware. Its a software issue. There are plenty of cheap hardware solutions with which one can run Linux, but this doesn't change the Microsoft monolopy on desktop software.
It really depends on what you are doing. Most businesses come down to the database (if you were ever wondering why those goofy DBA's get paid so much, now you know).
When you are talking databases, you can frankly ignore Microsoft. MS SQLServer has its features, but ultimately, you are stuck with an MS only product. Simply put, you don't want your database to be MS only. If your needs are simple, many opensrc databases can do the trick. If your needs are complex, you probably need some more support and should go with a proprietary job (Oracle, DB/2, etc). If your queries are simple, MySQL is pretty tough to beat. However, if you are doing more sofisticated transactions, working with over 1TB of data, and thinking about failover and cluster, then you are pretty much talking Oracle-time.
As for the middle-tier, services, etc, you definitly want to go open source. There just is no need to use any web server other than Apache. MS IIS makes me want to puke. Everything from Perl, to Java Servlets, to JSP will fill your middle-tier needs. Services are abundant, from SendMail to OpenLDAP. NovellDirectorService (free but not opensrc) is also not a bad F500 app. For NAS needs, definitly go with Samba. It performs just as well as win2k as a CIFS server. Where you will find trouble is with things like Exchange. If they want Exchange, you will have to go with a mixed system.
However, the real question shouldn't be opensrc code or proprietary code. Because, frankly F500 company's dont give a shit about paying for something. The real question is MS or *nix. MS has some great products, but they don't play nice with others. So for me, the answer is simple. Once you reach a certain size, you are going to have a few Linux boxes, some BSD boxes and maybe even a Solaris box. And you will run a healthy mix of opensrc and proprietary code on those systems.
What the heck is going on here? I go to this guy's sight thinking, maybe some new technology or science is out there, maybe some new movie is coming out, maybe some news for nerds, or even some stuff that matters. And I'm looking at this crappy site (which starts to make me dizzy), that starts rapid firing up pop-up ads (aka goatsex) for pr0n. Is this some kind of sick joke?
I always figured that the/. editorial staff was just a bunch of losers, who occassionaly posted interesting tidbits of tech/geek news submitted to them by the/. following.
Imagine my suprize this morning to find out that they are also a bunch of weirdo cultists and freaks who have been suckered into to some Moonie sect. My God! Tommorow, will/. pop up weird religious advertisments? Will some guy wearing an Anonymous Coward T-shirt show up at my door with a Bible in his hands? Of course it makes perfect sense. Cults like the Moonies tend to draw in suckers and fudmasters like the/. staff.
Microsoft has battled back to the top of the Internet heap, with more heavy-duty products coming to market this year than ever before, profits soaring again, and more research and development money in the bank than most of the world's nations can ever get their hands on, not to mention Microsoft's many out-maneuvered competitors. Microsoft is not ontop of the internet Heap. The server side of the internet is still heavily weighted by *nix platforms runing open source software. Microsoft is a minor player in the ISP market compared to the likes of AOL and Earthlink. They also are not driving the content of the web, nor do they have any presence as one of the major web retailers.
Microsoft, reports Business week in a thorough report in its June 4 issue, and discussed in on Slashdot two weeks ago, is drowning in cash: $30 billion, more than any other company in the Corporate Republic formerly known as America. FUD. Microsoft put 4.8 billion in cash on the books last quarter. They have over 30 billion in current assets (cash, short-term investments, stocks). However, most major banks and large investment houses have hundreds of billions in current assets.
Microsoft is not, as the new administration has made abuntantly clear, about to be broken up. It has cashed in on its enormously profitable near-monopolies for desktop and server software. Server software monopoly? cough cough Apache cough Linux cough Java cough Perl cough cough Send Mail cough... etc. You are the Wotan Master of FUD.
Analysts believe it will soon return to 20 percent revenue growth, up from 14 percent today, which already is nearly double last year's. Good for them.
The company is also launching a mind-boggling series of sweeping and expensive new initiatives:
.Net services, software that permits unrelated Web sites to talk with one another and with PC programs, without the user having to open new programs or visit new sities. This is the company's wedge into Web services. Well, if they practice what they preach, this is the first place-nice integration MS has ever done. Exporting their software with soapy xml (w3c standard) is actually a step in the right direction. If they don't f-it all up. As for.NET, totally unproven, risky gamble.
XBox. As we know, this is the company's huge leap into the $20 billion game console business, scheduled for launch on November 9. XBox is supposed to be three times more powerful than Sony's or Nintendo's boxes, and Microsoft says it plans to spend $500 million on advertising in the first 18 months alone.
Those same analysts say that if X-box every turns a profit, it wont be for at least 4 years out. Not to mention, MS has always failed in consumer electronics, and they are up against Sony. Plus, alot of that money being pumped in to the X-box is going to the game designer companies, that view this as a win-win.
Small Business Software. For the first time, Microsoft will jump into the $19 billion small-business software arena, says Business Week, having bought accounting software specialist Great Plains Software for $1.l billion in April. The company says it then plans to offer customer-relationship, human-resources, and supply-chain software. You're in some fuddy waters again. I would call MSOffice small business software, and frankly Office is MS's most profitable and lucrative monopoly. However, Microsoft's small business software suites that you are referring to have all landed them as duds. Sales are relatively dismal for this unproven market which nobody has had any success with todate. As for Great Plains, anybody that has used this software welcomes the change. Maybe we can finaly upgrade our NT 3.1 boxes now that Great Plains is being run by Microsoft. Great Plains is good stuff, but man was it always behind the OS times or what?
Stinger, Microsoft's latest effort at software for cellphones, begins trials in Europe later this year. Oh my god how terrible. R&D in a new market. The way I see it this is fine. They aren't leveraging any monopoly here (and because of it they will get their ass's toasted).
Ultimate TV. Described by industry analysts as a "set-top box on steroids." For less than $400, this box will allow people to surf the Web and interact with TV shows, and record progams on hard drives for storage and later viewing. Boy this market is on fire too. Let them piss their money away. a) nobody uses it or is going to use it. b) good for them, they aren't leveraging their OS or Office software here either!
On top of that, Windows XP, the biggest update in more than five years, is scheduled for late October. XP is just Win2k with some extra crap thrown into it. Win2k is just NT with some bug fixes and a cleaner UI. Microsoft's NT OS versions are just like their Word product (nothing different, except that you'll spend a few hours configuring it after you upgrade). Plus, XP signs the end of the shitty win95/win98/winMe kernel. Thank god! Poor suckers have been living with that unprotected piece of sh*t for 6 f'ing years now!
The company is also breaking out of the low end of the server market with Windows 2000, which began shipping last year. Services running Win2000 claimed 41 per cent of the market, says Business Week, up from 38 per cent in l999. Mixing your facts up. Microsoft is trying to get into the high-end (traditional RISC you know what the f I mean) market. Tred softly MS, because these guys are serious and they mean business. There names are IBM, SUN, HP to name a few. I see this as good news and hopefully will drive down some of those sun fire prices! As for this Services figure, thats the back-office stuff, not the high end market. That stuff is priciply driven by MS's monopoly on Office software.
There's much more. Uhg. I'm getting tired.
MSN is now one of the most heavily-trafficked sites on the Web, the msn.com portal ranking second in this country behind Yahoo. Hotmail is the world's most used free e-mail service, and MSN Internet Access second only to AOL as the most popular consumer route to the Web. FUD FUD FUD. MSN's traffic is driven mostly by idiots browsing to it after they install windows for the first time. Earthlink is #2 for internet access, not MSN. Hotmail has the marketshare of the free-email services (free mind you) but the competition is still present (competing for what I wonder?)
This from a company much criticized for failing to perceive the Web's importance a few years ago.
True, they were scared sh*tless, because the web was driven by servers (*nix) not windows 95.
The rise of MSN demonstrates just how difficult it is to compete with this company. Compete for what? Portal space? Yahoo is #1. AOL in a wierd way is also #1 if you think about it.
Were it owned by anyone else, the long-struggling MSN would have gone belly-up long ago. True because it is just a website. Websites alone aren't a business (/.)
But Microsoft can subsidize its products through good and bad times, creating an environment in which it's difficult, if not impossible, for competitors to survive. Yes, this is true, however any large company can also do this. Sun subsidizes its lowend servers and software from the highend sales. IBM is subsidizing all of its current Linux spending with sales from its other businesses. Subsidizing is not nessessary evil; leveraging however is. And Microsoft does leverage its OS and Office suite.
Microsoft now operates under its own notions of Darwinian business evolution. That is, the rich prey on potential competitors and hang on until they win. Actually that is the socialist theory. Microsoft believes the most productive will survive and that they are the most productive.
Microsoft is also getting serious about the handheld devices market; its Pocket PC has begun eating into Palm's market share. According to Net market researcher IDC, Pocket PC should hold 19 percent of the market by year's end, up from 10 percent two years ago. Suprizing what color screens will do. Again, MS is not using any leverage from its OS or Office suite here. Palm integrates pretty well with Office.
The market for Windows servers grew 32 percent this year, while sales of servers running Unix grew only 14 percent. Grr, back here again eh? Think carefully... Oh yeah, linux is free. No OS... Hmmm. When you add in the OS-less server sales the figures quickly change in favor of Non-Microsoft servers.
Furthermore, Microsoft will spend $4.2 billion on research and development this year, while unleashing the above cavalcade of significant new products and initiatives, starting this week with the launch of Office XP. Just whose side are you on? Spending 4.5 billion on R&D. Releasing significant new products and initiatives. Hmmm, whats the problem here?
Waiting in the wings are Microsoft's "pipeline initiatives," under development or planned for later launch: the first table PC; natural-language processing (talking to computers the same way you talk to people); face mapping (using digital camers to scan a PC user's head into a 3D image so that software can add a full range of emotions for gamers); information agents (software agents that sift and sort through information for businesses and consumers). Great. Meanwhile, on the Open Source front, Star Office is still trying to read a f-ing word file. No offense to Open Source and Star Office, but the intiatives you just mentioned are all good things.
It seems almost silly to argue that this is too much power for a single company to wield over something as central to the country's business, entertainment and cultural life as the Net and the Web. But Microsoft's power is barely mentioned in politics or the popular press, and seems of little concern outside of the open source and the boardrooms of some competitors. No company has ever dominated so enormous a part of the country's economy as Microsoft is about to do. The company is moving far beyond the ability of competitors to challenge it, and thus offer consumers any real choices. In fact, the company has grown much more monopolistic than when the government sued it. Blah blah blah. Too much power eh? Hmmm, maybe we should set up some sort of Committee to oversee it. Some kind of Vangaurd Elite Committee. You could be... Chairman. All kidding aside, I agree with you on the OS and Office issues. Its a monopoly and they are abusing it. On all other counts you are smokin crack.
Since almost everyone who goes online intersects with a Microsoft product, there are substantial privacy concerns. It follows that MS knows more about the Web habits of Americans than any other company. FUD. Its a concern, but one that watch groups are constantly monitoring, just like the Intel serial numbers.
And should the company ever decide to impose political or cultural values on its users and properties, it could have an enormous impact on speech and the transmission of political ideas. Too bad this wasn't the crux of your arguement, because I do feel there are some issues here surrounding IE. I wouldn't characterize the impact as "enourmous" however.
The return of Microsoft, and its ferocious onslaught on well-funded new initiatives and projects is re-writing both government and civic history. What the f are you talking about? Dude, you are seriously paranoid.
We now have the Unaccountable Company, bigger than the government of the nation in which it resides, beyond the reach of legislators, regulators, citizens, critics, victims, or more individualistic and entrepeneurial competitors.
Bigger than the government again eh? Whatever FUD master. I wish it was bigger than the government. It shames me to think how big our government is. It would be nice if there were some private enterprizes that spent more. Also, Microsoft is 100% to its shareholders don't forget.
People who need the Net and the Web in their personal loves or workplaces will do business with Microsoft, or they won't do business. To some degree yes, principly because MS is still getting payback for unifying the desktop OS.
That returns Gates to his pre-lawsuit position as the pre-eminent figure of the Internet, invincible as Frankenstein's monster, the creature that really can't be vanquished or driven off. Spare us Katz. You are the monster with this horrible analogy that you keep making.
Slashdot Mirror
Tom Baker rules.
Usability testing tends to be primarily focused on GUI desktop applications. Right there you pretty much nix most open src projects. However, there are quite a few open source desktop apps. Mozilla for example doesn't do any formal usability testing, although the a good majority of the bugs submitted are "enhancements" of the usability nature. I'd imagine that during Star Office's proprietary days under Sun and StarDivision, that some sort of usability testing was performed. However, I doubt that any is currently happening for Open Office. The problem is that focus groups and usability tests cost money. I wonder if groups like Ximian are doing this sort of thing?
Moore's Law: CPU capacity shall double every 18-24 months.
/. editors will deminish by %50 every 18-24 months.
/. front page posting entitled, "Goatsex and You" shall dimminish by %50 every 18-24 months.
Ammendment I: Bus speed shall pretty much stay dormant, until some asshole decides to get off his ass and do something about it.
Ammendment II: Tape as a hard storage solution will stick around like Herpes. Sure some gerks at Livermoore will screw around with rubies and diamonds, but the reality is one upgrade of the 8-track after another.
Ammendment III: A hard drive's fragility will double every 18-24 months. Shit, the instructions on the last hard drive I got said, "Do not breathe in room with hard drive before installation."
Ammendment IV: The average number of patches required between releases of software shall double every 18-24 months.
Ammendment V: The number of hours it takes you to turn of the stupid marketeering features of the new windows Office release, like auto-capitalizer, will double every 18-24 months.
Ammendment VI: (added by Microsoft recently) The ammount of money you pay us for software you have to buy will now double every 18-24 months.
Ammendment VII: The number of months before Mozilla 1.0 is released doubles every 18-24 months.
Ammendment VIII: The number of people who use emacs and the number of people who use vi hasn't changed since 1992 and may become one of the constants of physics (like the speed of light).
Ammendment IX: The editorial skills of the
Ammendment X: The number of stupid patents issued shall double every 18-24 months.
Ammendment XI: The number of RAID variations shall double every 18-24 months and the number of different labels for the same variation shall also double every 18-24 months.
Ammendment XII: The chances of a
"The Intern-what?" - Vince Cerf
But, all of this is irrelevant, because there is no limit on how quickly we can know a single fact, because we can determine a theoretical infinite number of facts from a single query with quantum computing.
First off, my guess is that /. is running asci on the servers, which is fair considering the site is in English. Second, if they were running unicode on the servers, they would have to update their lameness-filters significantly to deal with the goatsex problem.
Assertion failed line 1.
Intelligent Commentary posted on /. !!! Somebody knows what they are talking about. Shutdown the servers. MySQL must be acting up again! ECC failure! The CPU is running too hot! Drive failure! Katz must be out sick!
I've been wanted to start game project for a worldwide Illuminati multiplayer game, but I had a hard time tracking down free map vector data to base the game from. This sounds like a potential spot. The main screen of the game was a 3D view of the globe, so you can see how it was important. I've been waiting for something like this for a while now.
Minsky has the best approach. Throw all of the approaches into the same box. However, its a shame that he is such a losey speaker. All of the important information in his speach could have been put into about six sentences.
The real problem is that we are incredibly dependant on fossil fuels. To claim, that conservation by restraint (or frankly even by efficeincy) will reverse the problem in the atmosphere is without basis (unless drastic, draconian measures were taken, i.e. 65-70% global reductions). Even with the Kyoto agreement, C02 levels would be expected to double the levels of 1995 between 2050-2070. Cars only produce 1/3 of the C02. Even if we could move all cars and trucks to electric-hybrids, the resulting CO2 levels would only be about 15%. That would still get us on track for a C02 doubling this century.
I agree with you that our leadership lacks the political balls to really address this issue. It would take a benevolant dictator I think to really address this issue. The first issue that needs to be addressed is the nuclear power issue. What is more dangerous? Radioactive Waste or a 10 foot sea level increase. Nuclear of course is no where close to a complete answer. It is expensive, and not appropriate for the third world. We need a massive (manhattan project + Apollo + WWII + Genome) international collition of scientists. Yank all of those engineers in Russia and the US working on the space program, all those engineers working on free software, all of the engineers working on whatever, and get them in a room to work this issue out. We spend 6% of the US government's budget on an orbiting vegitable garden (US international space station). The US gov spends less than 0.01% researching alternative energies. Time to let that bucket of useless crap fall into the ocean and put all of those people to work doing something productive (except for their budget managers who are fired).
The only realistic solution that you are suggesting is cutting back on energy consumption drastically. Solar Panels simply can't meet the energy needs of the world. Gasoline is an amazing thing. It really is quite incredible. It contains an impressive amount of chemical energy for its weight. There is nothing to replace it. Sure battery powered cars (less efficient than gas turbines) could concentrate production to the power plants which burn 70% more efficient. However, that is only fraction of the emissions. You will still end up with the emissions. The Kyoto Agreement was a fraud. "Decrease Carbon Emissions for 1st world (only) countries to 5% below 1992 levels)." You think that will do anything to slow down emissions? It is a triffling. It doesnt address emerging nations, where the majority of the future coal and oil will be burned (China and India). The Global Effort should be "FIND A NEW SOURCE OF ENERGY THAT IS A GOOD REPLACEMENT FOR FOSSIL FUELS." I say go with fission until fusion is ready, but they can't even agree to cut greenhouse emissions by 5%, how will they agree to deal with nuclear waste?
Nothing against Darwin or BSD but those are great server platforms. While X-windows is good for some things, what I really want, is a *nix desktop that I can run MS Office and Internet Explorer on. Call me crazy, but I'm sick of the dual boot, because some jack ass sends me an Excel doc with a graph or something in it that I can read with Star Office. OS-X looks like it can do this. I just wish Apple had the incentive to port all of OS-X to various archs. That way, MS-Office would also be ported.
I guess the problem that I have with OS-X is that the latest hardware it runs on is the G4. I can run OpenBSD on dozens of architectures; dido linux. Windows is more limited, but at least the hardware is open. I can build my own intel box for pretty cheap. Could I do the same with an architecture that supports Mac OS-X? If not, when. I hear they are porting Darwin to x86, when are they going to port the whole package over?
Can you install OS-X on an box not built by Apple? Are there commerical vendors selling non-apple hardware that runs OS-X?
You could author a simple script to do that. The problem is that some cookies you probably want to live. For example, I want my NYTimes cookie to live, so I dont have to login all of the time. Same with my slashdot cookie. I dont care if the NYtimes tracks my demo-data: He logins in, he views the front page, he views the tech page, he views the business page, he views the science page, he never clicks on an add. However, I don't want some pr0n site tracking my movements, nor some crappy software company that's going to correlate me with an email address that I registered to buy something with.
If I were designing a browser, I would have a cookie monitoring window, which would log cookie activity. One could author filtration scripts to block certain domains from cookie access, manually delete cookies from the monitor window, etc.
What is a PC? What is a computer? Will my router have to have one? Give me a break. This is exactly the kind of law that starts with the best of intentions and ends up like that annoying seat belt alarm that goes off when you put your briefcase on the passanger seat.
So, the bottom line is that we need alternative energy sources and we need them now. Biofuels dont even come close (Literally all of the farmable land on the Earth would have to be deditcated to corn just to produce the current world energy need.) Solar, Wind and Geothermal just dont make enough juice. Fusion is too far out. What is left.
Well Nuclear stands a chance, but people are too much of a bunch of pussies to use it. So I'll tell you what the solution will be. Let the fucking sealevels rise. I want my car. I want my heat. I want my oil. We went to Kuwate with a couple of Aircraft carrieries and dropped more explosives on that psycho in Iraq than we used in all of WWII. Do you think we will just turn off our cars. Shut off the lights? No, we'll keep them on. And so will the Chineese. Millions will die as a result. But Millions would die if you shut the power off too. So either come up will a new source of power, or buy some land on a hilltop.
Game Cartridges used to have additional hardware, such as memory, to enhance the system resources. It was a hack to distribute some of the cost of the console to the game developers.
Microsoft's dominance in the desktop market has nothing to do with hardware. Its a software issue. There are plenty of cheap hardware solutions with which one can run Linux, but this doesn't change the Microsoft monolopy on desktop software.
When you are talking databases, you can frankly ignore Microsoft. MS SQLServer has its features, but ultimately, you are stuck with an MS only product. Simply put, you don't want your database to be MS only. If your needs are simple, many opensrc databases can do the trick. If your needs are complex, you probably need some more support and should go with a proprietary job (Oracle, DB/2, etc). If your queries are simple, MySQL is pretty tough to beat. However, if you are doing more sofisticated transactions, working with over 1TB of data, and thinking about failover and cluster, then you are pretty much talking Oracle-time.
As for the middle-tier, services, etc, you definitly want to go open source. There just is no need to use any web server other than Apache. MS IIS makes me want to puke. Everything from Perl, to Java Servlets, to JSP will fill your middle-tier needs. Services are abundant, from SendMail to OpenLDAP. NovellDirectorService (free but not opensrc) is also not a bad F500 app. For NAS needs, definitly go with Samba. It performs just as well as win2k as a CIFS server. Where you will find trouble is with things like Exchange. If they want Exchange, you will have to go with a mixed system.
However, the real question shouldn't be opensrc code or proprietary code. Because, frankly F500 company's dont give a shit about paying for something. The real question is MS or *nix. MS has some great products, but they don't play nice with others. So for me, the answer is simple. Once you reach a certain size, you are going to have a few Linux boxes, some BSD boxes and maybe even a Solaris box. And you will run a healthy mix of opensrc and proprietary code on those systems.
You dont understand. This is the /. vetting process for a new potential editor. Clearly, this guy is Editor-in-Chief material.
What the heck is going on here? I go to this guy's sight thinking, maybe some new technology or science is out there, maybe some new movie is coming out, maybe some news for nerds, or even some stuff that matters. And I'm looking at this crappy site (which starts to make me dizzy), that starts rapid firing up pop-up ads (aka goatsex) for pr0n. Is this some kind of sick joke?
I always figured that the /. editorial staff was just a bunch of losers, who occassionaly posted interesting tidbits of tech/geek news submitted to them by the /. following.
Imagine my suprize this morning to find out that they are also a bunch of weirdo cultists and freaks who have been suckered into to some Moonie sect. My God! Tommorow, will /. pop up weird religious advertisments? Will some guy wearing an Anonymous Coward T-shirt show up at my door with a Bible in his hands? Of course it makes perfect sense. Cults like the Moonies tend to draw in suckers and fudmasters like the /. staff.
Microsoft has battled back to the top of the Internet heap, with more heavy-duty products coming to market this year than ever before, profits soaring again, and more research and development money in the bank than most of the world's nations can ever get their hands on, not to mention Microsoft's many out-maneuvered competitors.
Microsoft is not ontop of the internet Heap. The server side of the internet is still heavily weighted by *nix platforms runing open source software. Microsoft is a minor player in the ISP market compared to the likes of AOL and Earthlink. They also are not driving the content of the web, nor do they have any presence as one of the major web retailers.
Microsoft, reports Business week in a thorough report in its June 4 issue, and discussed in on Slashdot two weeks ago, is drowning in cash: $30 billion, more than any other company in the Corporate Republic formerly known as America.
FUD. Microsoft put 4.8 billion in cash on the books last quarter. They have over 30 billion in current assets (cash, short-term investments, stocks). However, most major banks and large investment houses have hundreds of billions in current assets.
Microsoft is not, as the new administration has made abuntantly clear, about to be broken up. It has cashed in on its enormously profitable near-monopolies for desktop and server software.
Server software monopoly? cough cough Apache cough Linux cough Java cough Perl cough cough Send Mail cough... etc. You are the Wotan Master of FUD.
Analysts believe it will soon return to 20 percent revenue growth, up from 14 percent today, which already is nearly double last year's.
Good for them.
The company is also launching a mind-boggling series of sweeping and expensive new initiatives:
Well, if they practice what they preach, this is the first place-nice integration MS has ever done. Exporting their software with soapy xml (w3c standard) is actually a step in the right direction. If they don't f-it all up. As for
XBox. As we know, this is the company's huge leap into the $20 billion game console business, scheduled for launch on November 9. XBox is supposed to be three times more powerful than Sony's or Nintendo's boxes, and Microsoft says it plans to spend $500 million on advertising in the first 18 months alone.
Those same analysts say that if X-box every turns a profit, it wont be for at least 4 years out. Not to mention, MS has always failed in consumer electronics, and they are up against Sony. Plus, alot of that money being pumped in to the X-box is going to the game designer companies, that view this as a win-win.
Small Business Software. For the first time, Microsoft will jump into the $19 billion small-business software arena, says Business Week, having bought accounting software specialist Great Plains Software for $1.l billion in April. The company says it then plans to offer customer-relationship, human-resources, and supply-chain software.
You're in some fuddy waters again. I would call MSOffice small business software, and frankly Office is MS's most profitable and lucrative monopoly. However, Microsoft's small business software suites that you are referring to have all landed them as duds. Sales are relatively dismal for this unproven market which nobody has had any success with todate. As for Great Plains, anybody that has used this software welcomes the change. Maybe we can finaly upgrade our NT 3.1 boxes now that Great Plains is being run by Microsoft. Great Plains is good stuff, but man was it always behind the OS times or what?
Stinger, Microsoft's latest effort at software for cellphones, begins trials in Europe later this year.
Oh my god how terrible. R&D in a new market. The way I see it this is fine. They aren't leveraging any monopoly here (and because of it they will get their ass's toasted).
Ultimate TV. Described by industry analysts as a "set-top box on steroids." For less than $400, this box will allow people to surf the Web and interact with TV shows, and record progams on hard drives for storage and later viewing.
Boy this market is on fire too. Let them piss their money away. a) nobody uses it or is going to use it. b) good for them, they aren't leveraging their OS or Office software here either!
On top of that, Windows XP, the biggest update in more than five years, is scheduled for late October.
XP is just Win2k with some extra crap thrown into it. Win2k is just NT with some bug fixes and a cleaner UI. Microsoft's NT OS versions are just like their Word product (nothing different, except that you'll spend a few hours configuring it after you upgrade). Plus, XP signs the end of the shitty win95/win98/winMe kernel. Thank god! Poor suckers have been living with that unprotected piece of sh*t for 6 f'ing years now!
The company is also breaking out of the low end of the server market with Windows 2000, which began shipping last year. Services running Win2000 claimed 41 per cent of the market, says Business Week, up from 38 per cent in l999.
Mixing your facts up. Microsoft is trying to get into the high-end (traditional RISC you know what the f I mean) market. Tred softly MS, because these guys are serious and they mean business. There names are IBM, SUN, HP to name a few. I see this as good news and hopefully will drive down some of those sun fire prices! As for this Services figure, thats the back-office stuff, not the high end market. That stuff is priciply driven by MS's monopoly on Office software.
There's much more.
Uhg. I'm getting tired.
MSN is now one of the most heavily-trafficked sites on the Web, the msn.com portal ranking second in this country behind Yahoo. Hotmail is the world's most used free e-mail service, and MSN Internet Access second only to AOL as the most popular consumer route to the Web.
FUD FUD FUD. MSN's traffic is driven mostly by idiots browsing to it after they install windows for the first time. Earthlink is #2 for internet access, not MSN. Hotmail has the marketshare of the free-email services (free mind you) but the competition is still present (competing for what I wonder?)
This from a company much criticized for failing to perceive the Web's importance a few years ago.
True, they were scared sh*tless, because the web was driven by servers (*nix) not windows 95.
The rise of MSN demonstrates just how difficult it is to compete with this company.
Compete for what? Portal space? Yahoo is #1. AOL in a wierd way is also #1 if you think about it.
Were it owned by anyone else, the long-struggling MSN would have gone belly-up long ago.
True because it is just a website. Websites alone aren't a business (/.)
But Microsoft can subsidize its products through good and bad times, creating an environment in which it's difficult, if not impossible, for competitors to survive.
Yes, this is true, however any large company can also do this. Sun subsidizes its lowend servers and software from the highend sales. IBM is subsidizing all of its current Linux spending with sales from its other businesses. Subsidizing is not nessessary evil; leveraging however is. And Microsoft does leverage its OS and Office suite.
Microsoft now operates under its own notions of Darwinian business evolution. That is, the rich prey on potential competitors and hang on until they win.
Actually that is the socialist theory. Microsoft believes the most productive will survive and that they are the most productive.
Microsoft is also getting serious about the handheld devices market; its Pocket PC has begun eating into Palm's market share. According to Net market researcher IDC, Pocket PC should hold 19 percent of the market by year's end, up from 10 percent two years ago.
Suprizing what color screens will do. Again, MS is not using any leverage from its OS or Office suite here. Palm integrates pretty well with Office.
The market for Windows servers grew 32 percent this year, while sales of servers running Unix grew only 14 percent.
Grr, back here again eh? Think carefully... Oh yeah, linux is free. No OS... Hmmm. When you add in the OS-less server sales the figures quickly change in favor of Non-Microsoft servers.
Furthermore, Microsoft will spend $4.2 billion on research and development this year, while unleashing the above cavalcade of significant new products and initiatives, starting this week with the launch of Office XP.
Just whose side are you on? Spending 4.5 billion on R&D. Releasing significant new products and initiatives. Hmmm, whats the problem here?
Waiting in the wings are Microsoft's "pipeline initiatives," under development or planned for later launch: the first table PC; natural-language processing (talking to computers the same way you talk to people); face mapping (using digital camers to scan a PC user's head into a 3D image so that software can add a full range of emotions for gamers); information agents (software agents that sift and sort through information for businesses and consumers).
Great. Meanwhile, on the Open Source front, Star Office is still trying to read a f-ing word file. No offense to Open Source and Star Office, but the intiatives you just mentioned are all good things.
It seems almost silly to argue that this is too much power for a single company to wield over something as central to the country's business, entertainment and cultural life as the Net and the Web. But Microsoft's power is barely mentioned in politics or the popular press, and seems of little concern outside of the open source and the boardrooms of some competitors. No company has ever dominated so enormous a part of the country's economy as Microsoft is about to do. The company is moving far beyond the ability of competitors to challenge it, and thus offer consumers any real choices. In fact, the company has grown much more monopolistic than when the government sued it.
Blah blah blah. Too much power eh? Hmmm, maybe we should set up some sort of Committee to oversee it. Some kind of Vangaurd Elite Committee. You could be... Chairman. All kidding aside, I agree with you on the OS and Office issues. Its a monopoly and they are abusing it. On all other counts you are smokin crack.
Since almost everyone who goes online intersects with a Microsoft product, there are substantial privacy concerns. It follows that MS knows more about the Web habits of Americans than any other company.
FUD. Its a concern, but one that watch groups are constantly monitoring, just like the Intel serial numbers.
And should the company ever decide to impose political or cultural values on its users and properties, it could have an enormous impact on speech and the transmission of political ideas.
Too bad this wasn't the crux of your arguement, because I do feel there are some issues here surrounding IE. I wouldn't characterize the impact as "enourmous" however.
The return of Microsoft, and its ferocious onslaught on well-funded new initiatives and projects is re-writing both government and civic history.
What the f are you talking about? Dude, you are seriously paranoid.
We now have the Unaccountable Company, bigger than the government of the nation in which it resides, beyond the reach of legislators, regulators, citizens, critics, victims, or more individualistic and entrepeneurial competitors.
Bigger than the government again eh? Whatever FUD master. I wish it was bigger than the government. It shames me to think how big our government is. It would be nice if there were some private enterprizes that spent more. Also, Microsoft is 100% to its shareholders don't forget.
People who need the Net and the Web in their personal loves or workplaces will do business with Microsoft, or they won't do business.
To some degree yes, principly because MS is still getting payback for unifying the desktop OS.
That returns Gates to his pre-lawsuit position as the pre-eminent figure of the Internet, invincible as Frankenstein's monster, the creature that really can't be vanquished or driven off.
Spare us Katz. You are the monster with this horrible analogy that you keep making.