FreeBSD is now getting shelf space at CompUSA, which should give it at least a little bit of "mindshare."
Hadn't seem FreeBSD at CompUSA. Can't say that I was looking for it though.
I see Linux all over the place. From what I'm hearing here, there's no reason that *BSD couldn't be a big seller at CompUSA and Circuit City, too. It sure is getting some good press lately. Seems like you could target market FreeBSD as a more 'serious' Free OS, like Linux, but more 'mature'.
Is anybody taking a *BSD distro mass market like Red Hat and others are doing with Linux? Aside from BSDI, of course, but they have a different target market than the Red Hat's do.
How about commercial support? Will anybody other than BSDI contract commercial support for *BSD to you?
Is the existence of BSDI, so far ahead of any potential startup in the *BSD field, holding down the potential entries in this field?
Maybe BSDI should hit the shrink-wrapped distro market if nobody else does. If not them, maybe one of the Linux vendors could pick it up as a sideline. Seems like there would be obvious synergies for a Linux distro company if Linux and FreeBSD are the same in Userland as we've been hearing.
Please moderate the parent of this, and the author's subsequent Comment in this thread where he points out that the referenced News article was attempted to be canceled, way up. This references a real honest-to-god statement by a genuine transmeta employee making a statement about microprocessor architecture! Gee whiz, what's more deserving than this!?
How is this flamebait?? I sure hope I get the chance to MetaModerate this.
Must be some Transmeta moderators out there... Or maybe Intel...
OK, I'm sorry, that was dumb of me. I based that on a perception without checking. It does appear that 5s are more common than 4s.
However, for reasons I explained you would expect this. If there infinite + and - points that could be assigned, etc. you'd expect it to be a Bell Curve (? wouldn't you?).
All of the above are self explanatory except the [Nirvana Threshold]. This could be some threshold that's quite high, possibly the 4th standard deviation positive from the distribution of all Karmas. Maybe a factor could be thrown in to lessen the influence of account age, but you get the idea. I'm not sure whether to round up or down the moderator points assigned. Of course, no fractional points should be allowed (hmmmm.... no that was dumb, no fractional points allowed).
This system has the significant advantage of being very geeky, but still understandable to someone without more than High School Algebra.
I really feel that your/. seniority should have a real weight in the matter, not just a cutoff (no newbies). I respect the old-timers who have been consistently moderated up in the past.
The problem with basing ability to moderate and moderation points on Karma alone is that newbies , and I'm probably guilty of this, might be working too hard to increase their Karma. This might tend to generate a lot of popular Comments that are really just there to get applause rather than real meat.
An advantage to allowing new moderators just a few points might encourage these new moderators to take great care in assigning them.
Another benefit to penalizing new accounts on a sliding scale is that it would tend to discourage people from creating new accounts just because they are in a Karmic hole.
One potential problem is that someone with only 1 point might be more likely to only moderate up. I know I wouldn't want to waste my point on some Troll. Possibly assigning points in pairs (+/-) would help here. I like this. Moderation points are actually quantum fluctuations.
Here's a question for Rob, What is the "average" moderation? + or -? If you assigned in pairs the "average" moderation would tend to be zero. Not exactly zero as some people might not use all of their points before expiration. Would this be a good thing or a bad thing?
In general, the idea is to increase the reliability of moderation, while allowing a broad cross-section to participate. A sliding scale, based on your Karma and seniority would help to promote this, I think.
One thing that I've noticed is that I get to MetaModerate every day, the first time I come to the Home Page in that day.
The other night I was on across midnight and, sure enough, when the clock struct twelve, I turned into a pumpk... err, a MetaModerator. This is especially odd as I'm not in the same time zone as/. I guess I wouldn't expect these functions to be timezone adjusted.
Is this working as intended? I thought being a MetaModerator was a sporadic thing. I've MetaModerated for at least 4 days straight and always the first time I'm on/. on that day.
+5s are pretty rare, 2s are very common, 3s less so, 4s fairly unusual. I might seem that -1 is assigned rather too often, but that might just be an illusion based on the fact that the bell curve ends at -1 on the minus side, so you have a "piling up" of all bad posts in the -1 category.
If what you are saying happens, you'd expect to see more 5s than 4s. Especially considering that the bell curve ends at 5 on the plus side, you'd expect to see more 5s than 4s ANYway, but I've not noticed this to be the case.
How about it Rob? What's the statistical breakdown on all Comments?
Oh, lighten up. He said it was cool and he featured it, didn't he? I don't remember him saying anything about it being slow.
Re:But is it really faster than a Starfire?
on
IBM takes aim at Sun
·
· Score: 1
Sheesh, first you say:
I'll believe it when it shows up on the top of this list, for example.
and then when someone points out that's a very real possibility, seeing as the second one on that list is a predecessor of this new IBM machine that is purported as being 2.5 times slower.
Then, what do you do? You change lists. Now, it seems, the real proof of greatness is how well you do it non-clustered.
Could it be that Sun doesn't have these good clustered benchmarks because Sun Clusters don't offer scaleable performance as do clusters from IBM and Compaq?
What I think you're really saying is that you're only impressed if it shows up on this comparison.
Usually, SAP installations are multi-million projects that involve business processes redesigns and other unpleasant stuff for people involved.
Bringing SAP to Linux is a major breakthrough for Linux in business though.
Not many of SAP's traditional user base would choose Linux today. bHowever, I understand that SAP is anxious to get into mid-size to small businesses as that's where they see their big growth potential is.
This is a potentially very big news. SAP had been growing increasingly close to Microsoft. I'm certain that Microsoft would not have wanted these benchmarks published, if at all possible.
I see two possibilities:
SAP doesn't care that they are kicking Microsoft in the shins. SAP also doesn't care that other big Unix vendors won't be happy to see this. This would mean that SAP is betting a lot on Linux.
The groups in SAP who do Linux and benchmarking don't check with their central Strategy and Marketing people, they just push forward. This is not at all unlikely. It's an indication of a healthy enterprise when there are not "institutional controls" that prevent groups from competing against each other.
Either way, it's big news for Linux. There are all kinds of software synergies that this pulls in. Oracle and Baan will need to address this as a competitive threat.
Oracle, Informix and IBM (with DB2) will be even more committed to a Back Linux strategy now as SAP integration is a big market for the database vendors. None of these vendors will want to leave the DB market open to the others in this potentially explosive growth market, so competition from them will be intense.
I wonder if anyone will read this. I'm responding so late in the game... Here it goes!
I read about a study done years ago by AT&T. They gave a documenting group a WYSIWYG document generation system and another went on using a markup system.
The markup system users were way more productive and the result was judged better.
The reasons? The WYSIWYG users were always touching up their formatting, a little change here, a little change there. They were wasting their time and producing inconsistent results.
If anybody reads this and is interested in the reference, I could try and dig it up. I'm pretty sure I still have it.
I don't know if you classify The Catholic Church as being on "the religious right", but seeing as The Catholic Church has no problem with evolution, I doubt that they would have a problem with the possibility of man creating life.
I agree that man would probably be irresponsible with it's power of creation, whether it be machine intelligence or biological creation. We have a history of being pretty irresponsible when we have great powers.
The power of life is a very great power to wield. Seeing so many examples of the way that many people irresponsibly use procreation for purely selfish reasons doesn't give me a lot of reason to believe that Man would be more responsible with new, technological abilities to create and manipulate life.
I don't understand those who feel that caution in the area of biological experimentation is backward and parochial. It seems thoughtful to me.
Ultimately, I think that religion can give us a larger context for understanding issues that we might not appreciate. If biological science can realistically promise eternal youth are we going to examine this gift carefully? Are we better off today because we now have Sexual "Freedom"? Sometimes, there's nothing but religious conviction standing in the way of a "Brave New World".
A lot of people of scientific bent that I know like to identify Evolution with Progress. This is a view that real Evolution Scientists, like Stephen Jay Gould, reject.
I think I agree with those who identify Evolution with Progress. I think there is something wonderful about our use of language, our ability to be reflective, our hunger for understanding in the abstract. These are things denied to all but a few species at most.
Why is it that religion, which, I like to believe, is a high product of cultural Evolution, is seen as backward and limiting? Every culture has developed religion and every religion concerns itself with inculcating values.
Many of the same people who see as "healthy" the expression of the instinctual desire to mate, even when inappropriate and dangerous, have nothing but derision for our apparently innate desire to commune with the ultimate, to seek out transcendence.
Mankind tinkering around in the lab creating life, linking DNA strands, or even cloning are not mentioned in the bible, so there's going to be an outcry.
There's no mention of airplanes, hamburgers, computers, microwave ovens, televisions, firearms, drywall, modems, heart bypass surgery, potatos, eye glasses, aluminum, tomatoes, helium, helicoptors, batteries, automobiles, olestra, liposuction, plastic, transistors, golf balls, radio, safety glass, bean dip, telephones, semiconductors, FORTRAN or Fortran, MP3, CDs or DVDs, EMF radiation that cannot be perceived as heat or light, and about a million other things that we use everyday in the Bible. Except for a few Amish, religious people generally have no problem with any of the above.
One of the most notable experiments involving living beings was Eugenics. I'm not comfortable with the possibilities surrounding Humans experimenting with life. A lot of religious leaders are expressing this same view.
Man-made viruses have the potential to eradicate human life and possibly all life on earth.
Perhaps you feel that there are no potential downsides to such experiments?
It seems to me that people here feel they have ownership over these issues and have trouble with other media covering them.
In a way, I can understand. These things are covered much better here. Perhaps some of the mass media could have Slashdot readers/contributors do collaborative articles. This could help fund Slashdot.
I don't have a good idea about such a thing could be organized, but it would be neat.
Who says that the new Internet Media isn't changing people's perceptions?
I understand it now. Linus came to the US to take up a career as a Supermodel. It only makes sense, really. He could have worked for Transmeta from Finland, but you have to go to Paris, London, Japan or the US to be a Supermodel!
Oh, so the anti-Microsoft lies have become so pervasive that EVERYBODY just knows that Microsoft is guilty of something or another. No, sorry, I don't know that. In fact, I find no credible evidence against them at all. Real evidence, not UseNET rumors and random hearsay.
Specifically, to which anti-Microsoft lie do you refer?
The DOJ filing containing damning Microsoft internal memoranda, the testimony of executives at IBM and Netscape, and the record of faked video demonstrations on the part of Microsoft, is not "UseNET rumors and random hearsay."
EVERYBODY knows what Microsoft was up to. Anonymous Cowards who may well be Microsoft spin machine flacks may be paid to say differently, but everybody knows it.
Uhhh... Read Slashdot or ANY technology news lately?
Sun just released a free office suite that reads and writes Office files. This product runs on Linux, as well as Windows.
I think with all of this free Office software out there that will read/write the older Office formats, there will be more standardization on the older formats. I would also expect to see conversion from the new Office formats soon.
Another thing to consider is the fact that Office 2000 is distinctly underwhelming in it's new feature list.
The home PC market is nearly saturated, or if not saturated, that's not where the big growth is. The big growth is in Internet applications and appliances. Linux has a huge growth potential here.
Linux will also seriously be cutting into Windows NT Server deployments, which is where MS makes a lot of their money.
Here's a news flash for the people who seem to be saying "Microsoft is invincible, just wait and watch." Microsoft is in financial trouble. Sure, they made $4.5 Billion last year. They paid, on paper, $18 Billion in stock options. If any of the above forces begin to cut into their stock price or futures, look for a huge cashing-in of those options that could bankrupt the company.
A point that a lot of people are missing from the original Comment that started this thread. It's not because the DOJ has had MS in court that MS has been in trouble. It's because MS has had to "play nice" during this period that has MS in trouble. When MS stops with the anti-competitive practices (bundling, dumping, buying out small competitors, etc.) they suddenly have problems.
While those who have a vested stake in the Microsoft status quo are hoping against hope for a favorable outcome in court, almost no serious observer believes that Microsoft won't lose and lose badly.
If the case is dismissed, watch every OEM backtrack on their commitments to Linux in fear of retaliation.
You give the reason yourself why Microsoft will lose in court. EVERYBODY knows that Microsoft used illegal tactics to make absolutely certain that there was no competition in the OS arena, and the DOJ has proved this in court.
It does begin to look this way, doesn't it? Your Chief Strategist moves over to become CTO of another company with which you maintain a close alliance...
Now, this would be interesting. It would make sense of what McNealey is saying that he doesn't want to see MS broken up by DOJ. AOL is aided by a stable Windows marketplace to ease it's entrance into more and more homes.
Sun/AOL would be a powerful force to challenge MS on many fronts. On the one hand, they'll be able to push MS in certain directions with regard to on-line features, on the other, they'll be able to push thin clients into homes and businesses. Of course, MS would probably respond by backing MSN even more, but MS hasn't been successful fighting AOL in the past...
If Sun/AOL combine, look for the combination to attempt to capture the burgeoning ASP market. Maybe this is why Intel is making noise about getting into the ASP market. They saw this coming and they're concerned that those Application Servers won't have Intel Inside. Even without a real Sun/AOL merger, an AOL ASP entry would probably be on Sun/Sparc based.
"Cygnus Solutions is the open-source software leader."
Cygnus has had explosive growth. I would guess that most of their revenues come from support of open-source software. They release and maintain a lot of open-source software.
Why does Cygnus involve itself in commercial closed-source product development and sales? If open-source has been a model that has provided such a profitable market for Cygnus, what is their rationale for creating and selling closed-source products?
Has Cygnus actually performed any marketing studies? Do they know, for a fact, that this actually optimizes their earnings? And, what about the long term? Open-source alternatives are being developed. Will Cygnus be able to compete with the open-source alternatives? Especially when selling into the Linux market?
Time will tell, but I'd like to believe that when open-source alternatives are available, they will ultimately have more features that people need, they will be more stable and I would tend to choose them because I know I can depend on the source if I have a problem and the company peddling it has gone away, or no longer supports the product. I also wonder about releases of this product on different architectures and if I'll ultimately be somehow tied to using some set of Linux distributions to use closed-source products on Linux.
Don't get me wrong. I appreciate all that Cygnus does for open-source. I would like to understand their approach to the marketplace. If there is real data that supports their hybrid approach, I'd like to know about it. Perhaps Cygnus has studied it and sees that there are limitations to providing open-source support only and that to survive you need commercial closed-source products as well. Their original business model was support of open-source products and I'd like to know why they've modified this.
A serious problem I see with being an employee these days is job security and maintaining a marketable skill set.
In today's economy, if you have experience as a contractor there's generally no problem whatsoever in being able to get a contracting assignment.
If you are a long term employee, you tend to cultivate a skill set that's specialized to the environment where you work. Sometimes this set of skills is highly marketable, often it's not.
If you are a contractor, you're much more likely to work on a wide variety of assignments with a range of marketable skills.
Often, employers are looking for people who are versatile with skills in specific newer technologies. This is often more likely to be contractors.
Let's face it, businesses often provide more job security to their contractors, who often have indispensible skills, than they do to employees.
It doesn't take a good employee long to see the problems that their laid-off ex-co-workers have with getting new employment to make them feel like they really need to seriously examine contracting.
A laid-off employee is viewed by new interviewers as a potential problem. Businesses rarely fire underperformers as it leaves you open for all kinds of wrongful dismissal suits and you have to spend a lot of time and expensive effort generating a paper trail to prove that the person is being fired for good cause. It's not a fair perception as businesses often lay off employees because their business is not doing well and this often has nothing to do with the performance of those laid-off. Interviewers are often wondering "Why did they lay this person off?"
Another problem is that a lot of large companies have a policy that prohibits their managers from saying anything good or bad about ex-employees and the question hangs out there large. You can hardly blame businesses for having this policy these days as people have been known to sue over what is generally a positive recommendation. I've known good managers who go out of their way to speak in code to skirt the corporate rules to let people who call about the good laid-off employees. Managers have to be careful though, as this is dealing with inflexible HR rules that can get you fired.
All in all, I really have to agree with the Comment I'm responding to here. If there's no job security, it's harder to keep your skills updated and the pay is so much worse, why would anyone who could contract not contract? A middle ground is working for a services firm like EDS, IBM Global Services, etc. There, you usually get somewhat better pay, you get a lot of opportunity to keep your skills up to date and there's plenty of work so you have job security.
All of these forces, and a bunch more, are why "outsourcing" is so popular these days. American business is just losing the ability to employ good people. Long term, I'd say it's indicative of serious problems.
I wish business would get less risk averse. They should be able to fire poor performers, not lay them off and say good things about people who are good performers who are laid off. A lot of this is just the result of the litigious society we live in. Some of it has to do with upper management's current war on middle management. From what I see, middle management is so overworked in most of today's business. They are the first place upper management looks to get rid of "fat". They are not trusted to make fair hiring/firing decisions. If companies had good policies, trusted their middle management and stood behind their decisions, things might be better. Maybe I'm being unfair to upper management and they are right. They just can't find middle management they can trust when it comes to decisions that could end up in court. These problems are one of the reasons that small businesses have such lower overheads when compared to companies that actually have upper and middle management layers. When you don't have deep pockets, you don't worry so much about law suits.
Thanks, I didn't know about that slashbox. I would still be interested in a feature that had especially highly rated items based on allowing moderators to assign extra points to it.
Perhaps this could be a MetaModerator function. If the Comment were at +5 the MetaModerator would be able to give it an "Exceptional" rating. The Comment with the most "Exceptional"s would get the feature every week. This would relieve the Moderators from having to give up their points for this feature.
I dunno, it's just a thought. I would be strongly influenced by a view that we should let the other new Moderation features work for awhile before introducing lots of changes.
Slashdot Mirror
Hadn't seem FreeBSD at CompUSA. Can't say that I was looking for it though.
I see Linux all over the place. From what I'm hearing here, there's no reason that *BSD couldn't be a big seller at CompUSA and Circuit City, too. It sure is getting some good press lately. Seems like you could target market FreeBSD as a more 'serious' Free OS, like Linux, but more 'mature'.
Is anybody taking a *BSD distro mass market like Red Hat and others are doing with Linux? Aside from BSDI, of course, but they have a different target market than the Red Hat's do.
How about commercial support? Will anybody other than BSDI contract commercial support for *BSD to you?
Is the existence of BSDI, so far ahead of any potential startup in the *BSD field, holding down the potential entries in this field?
Maybe BSDI should hit the shrink-wrapped distro market if nobody else does. If not them, maybe one of the Linux vendors could pick it up as a sideline. Seems like there would be obvious synergies for a Linux distro company if Linux and FreeBSD are the same in Userland as we've been hearing.
Please moderate the parent of this, and the author's subsequent Comment in this thread where he points out that the referenced News article was attempted to be canceled, way up. This references a real honest-to-god statement by a genuine transmeta employee making a statement about microprocessor architecture! Gee whiz, what's more deserving than this!?
How is this flamebait?? I sure hope I get the chance to MetaModerate this.
Must be some Transmeta moderators out there... Or maybe Intel...
I just don't know. I'm sorry but your excellent human translation is just missing something.
I think I prefer "Markengrabbing" to "brand name snatching". It just has a certain inexpressible flavor to it that's difficult to deny.
However, for reasons I explained you would expect this. If there infinite + and - points that could be assigned, etc. you'd expect it to be a Bell Curve (? wouldn't you?).
Conversely, I feel that truly old hands with very high Karma should have more points. This will aid /. in maintaining it's culture and flavor.
What I'm thinking is something like:
All of the above are self explanatory except the [Nirvana Threshold]. This could be some threshold that's quite high, possibly the 4th standard deviation positive from the distribution of all Karmas. Maybe a factor could be thrown in to lessen the influence of account age, but you get the idea. I'm not sure whether to round up or down the moderator points assigned. Of course, no fractional points should be allowed (hmmmm.... no that was dumb, no fractional points allowed).
This system has the significant advantage of being very geeky, but still understandable to someone without more than High School Algebra.
I really feel that your /. seniority should have a real weight in the matter, not just a cutoff (no newbies). I respect the old-timers who have been consistently moderated up in the past.
The problem with basing ability to moderate and moderation points on Karma alone is that newbies , and I'm probably guilty of this, might be working too hard to increase their Karma. This might tend to generate a lot of popular Comments that are really just there to get applause rather than real meat.
An advantage to allowing new moderators just a few points might encourage these new moderators to take great care in assigning them.
Another benefit to penalizing new accounts on a sliding scale is that it would tend to discourage people from creating new accounts just because they are in a Karmic hole.
One potential problem is that someone with only 1 point might be more likely to only moderate up. I know I wouldn't want to waste my point on some Troll. Possibly assigning points in pairs (+/-) would help here. I like this. Moderation points are actually quantum fluctuations.
Here's a question for Rob, What is the "average" moderation? + or -? If you assigned in pairs the "average" moderation would tend to be zero. Not exactly zero as some people might not use all of their points before expiration. Would this be a good thing or a bad thing?
In general, the idea is to increase the reliability of moderation, while allowing a broad cross-section to participate. A sliding scale, based on your Karma and seniority would help to promote this, I think.
The other night I was on across midnight and, sure enough, when the clock struct twelve, I turned into a pumpk... err, a MetaModerator. This is especially odd as I'm not in the same time zone as /. I guess I wouldn't expect these functions to be timezone adjusted.
Is this working as intended? I thought being a MetaModerator was a sporadic thing. I've MetaModerated for at least 4 days straight and always the first time I'm on /. on that day.
Bug? Feature? or both?
+5s are pretty rare, 2s are very common, 3s less so, 4s fairly unusual. I might seem that -1 is assigned rather too often, but that might just be an illusion based on the fact that the bell curve ends at -1 on the minus side, so you have a "piling up" of all bad posts in the -1 category.
If what you are saying happens, you'd expect to see more 5s than 4s. Especially considering that the bell curve ends at 5 on the plus side, you'd expect to see more 5s than 4s ANYway, but I've not noticed this to be the case.
How about it Rob? What's the statistical breakdown on all Comments?
Oh, lighten up. He said it was cool and he featured it, didn't he? I don't remember him saying anything about it being slow.
and then when someone points out that's a very real possibility, seeing as the second one on that list is a predecessor of this new IBM machine that is purported as being 2.5 times slower.
Then, what do you do? You change lists. Now, it seems, the real proof of greatness is how well you do it non-clustered.
Could it be that Sun doesn't have these good clustered benchmarks because Sun Clusters don't offer scaleable performance as do clusters from IBM and Compaq?
What I think you're really saying is that you're only impressed if it shows up on this comparison.
Bringing SAP to Linux is a major breakthrough for Linux in business though.
Not many of SAP's traditional user base would choose Linux today. bHowever, I understand that SAP is anxious to get into mid-size to small businesses as that's where they see their big growth potential is.
This is a potentially very big news. SAP had been growing increasingly close to Microsoft. I'm certain that Microsoft would not have wanted these benchmarks published, if at all possible.
I see two possibilities:
SAP doesn't care that they are kicking Microsoft in the shins. SAP also doesn't care that other big Unix vendors won't be happy to see this. This would mean that SAP is betting a lot on Linux.
The groups in SAP who do Linux and benchmarking don't check with their central Strategy and Marketing people, they just push forward. This is not at all unlikely. It's an indication of a healthy enterprise when there are not "institutional controls" that prevent groups from competing against each other.
Either way, it's big news for Linux. There are all kinds of software synergies that this pulls in. Oracle and Baan will need to address this as a competitive threat.
Oracle, Informix and IBM (with DB2) will be even more committed to a Back Linux strategy now as SAP integration is a big market for the database vendors. None of these vendors will want to leave the DB market open to the others in this potentially explosive growth market, so competition from them will be intense.
I wonder if anyone will read this. I'm responding so late in the game... Here it goes!
I read about a study done years ago by AT&T. They gave a documenting group a WYSIWYG document generation system and another went on using a markup system.
The markup system users were way more productive and the result was judged better.
The reasons? The WYSIWYG users were always touching up their formatting, a little change here, a little change there. They were wasting their time and producing inconsistent results.
If anybody reads this and is interested in the reference, I could try and dig it up. I'm pretty sure I still have it.
I agree that man would probably be irresponsible with it's power of creation, whether it be machine intelligence or biological creation. We have a history of being pretty irresponsible when we have great powers.
The power of life is a very great power to wield. Seeing so many examples of the way that many people irresponsibly use procreation for purely selfish reasons doesn't give me a lot of reason to believe that Man would be more responsible with new, technological abilities to create and manipulate life.
I don't understand those who feel that caution in the area of biological experimentation is backward and parochial. It seems thoughtful to me.
Ultimately, I think that religion can give us a larger context for understanding issues that we might not appreciate. If biological science can realistically promise eternal youth are we going to examine this gift carefully? Are we better off today because we now have Sexual "Freedom"? Sometimes, there's nothing but religious conviction standing in the way of a "Brave New World".
A lot of people of scientific bent that I know like to identify Evolution with Progress. This is a view that real Evolution Scientists, like Stephen Jay Gould, reject.
I think I agree with those who identify Evolution with Progress. I think there is something wonderful about our use of language, our ability to be reflective, our hunger for understanding in the abstract. These are things denied to all but a few species at most.
Why is it that religion, which, I like to believe, is a high product of cultural Evolution, is seen as backward and limiting? Every culture has developed religion and every religion concerns itself with inculcating values.
Many of the same people who see as "healthy" the expression of the instinctual desire to mate, even when inappropriate and dangerous, have nothing but derision for our apparently innate desire to commune with the ultimate, to seek out transcendence.
There's no mention of airplanes, hamburgers, computers, microwave ovens, televisions, firearms, drywall, modems, heart bypass surgery, potatos, eye glasses, aluminum, tomatoes, helium, helicoptors, batteries, automobiles, olestra, liposuction, plastic, transistors, golf balls, radio, safety glass, bean dip, telephones, semiconductors, FORTRAN or Fortran, MP3, CDs or DVDs, EMF radiation that cannot be perceived as heat or light, and about a million other things that we use everyday in the Bible. Except for a few Amish, religious people generally have no problem with any of the above.
One of the most notable experiments involving living beings was Eugenics. I'm not comfortable with the possibilities surrounding Humans experimenting with life. A lot of religious leaders are expressing this same view.
Man-made viruses have the potential to eradicate human life and possibly all life on earth.
Perhaps you feel that there are no potential downsides to such experiments?
It seems to me that people here feel they have ownership over these issues and have trouble with other media covering them.
In a way, I can understand. These things are covered much better here. Perhaps some of the mass media could have Slashdot readers/contributors do collaborative articles. This could help fund Slashdot.
I don't have a good idea about such a thing could be organized, but it would be neat.
Who says that the new Internet Media isn't changing people's perceptions?
I understand it now. Linus came to the US to take up a career as a Supermodel. It only makes sense, really. He could have worked for Transmeta from Finland, but you have to go to Paris, London, Japan or the US to be a Supermodel!
Hey, I like this. I might start calling it "Roland the headless Thomson gunner". The only problem is that it's kinda long...
We'd need to get rid of Tux, too. Anybody got a good image of a headless Thomson gunner?
Specifically, to which anti-Microsoft lie do you refer?
The DOJ filing containing damning Microsoft internal memoranda, the testimony of executives at IBM and Netscape, and the record of faked video demonstrations on the part of Microsoft, is not "UseNET rumors and random hearsay."
EVERYBODY knows what Microsoft was up to. Anonymous Cowards who may well be Microsoft spin machine flacks may be paid to say differently, but everybody knows it.
Uhhh... Read Slashdot or ANY technology news lately?
Sun just released a free office suite that reads and writes Office files. This product runs on Linux, as well as Windows.
I think with all of this free Office software out there that will read/write the older Office formats, there will be more standardization on the older formats. I would also expect to see conversion from the new Office formats soon.
Another thing to consider is the fact that Office 2000 is distinctly underwhelming in it's new feature list.
The home PC market is nearly saturated, or if not saturated, that's not where the big growth is. The big growth is in Internet applications and appliances. Linux has a huge growth potential here.
Linux will also seriously be cutting into Windows NT Server deployments, which is where MS makes a lot of their money.
Here's a news flash for the people who seem to be saying "Microsoft is invincible, just wait and watch." Microsoft is in financial trouble. Sure, they made $4.5 Billion last year. They paid, on paper, $18 Billion in stock options. If any of the above forces begin to cut into their stock price or futures, look for a huge cashing-in of those options that could bankrupt the company.
A point that a lot of people are missing from the original Comment that started this thread. It's not because the DOJ has had MS in court that MS has been in trouble. It's because MS has had to "play nice" during this period that has MS in trouble. When MS stops with the anti-competitive practices (bundling, dumping, buying out small competitors, etc.) they suddenly have problems.
While those who have a vested stake in the Microsoft status quo are hoping against hope for a favorable outcome in court, almost no serious observer believes that Microsoft won't lose and lose badly.
If the case is dismissed, watch every OEM backtrack on their commitments to Linux in fear of retaliation.
You give the reason yourself why Microsoft will lose in court. EVERYBODY knows that Microsoft used illegal tactics to make absolutely certain that there was no competition in the OS arena, and the DOJ has proved this in court.
It does begin to look this way, doesn't it? Your Chief Strategist moves over to become CTO of another company with which you maintain a close alliance...
Now, this would be interesting. It would make sense of what McNealey is saying that he doesn't want to see MS broken up by DOJ. AOL is aided by a stable Windows marketplace to ease it's entrance into more and more homes.
Sun/AOL would be a powerful force to challenge MS on many fronts. On the one hand, they'll be able to push MS in certain directions with regard to on-line features, on the other, they'll be able to push thin clients into homes and businesses. Of course, MS would probably respond by backing MSN even more, but MS hasn't been successful fighting AOL in the past...
If Sun/AOL combine, look for the combination to attempt to capture the burgeoning ASP market. Maybe this is why Intel is making noise about getting into the ASP market. They saw this coming and they're concerned that those Application Servers won't have Intel Inside. Even without a real Sun/AOL merger, an AOL ASP entry would probably be on Sun/Sparc based.
Reminiscent of that IBM e-Business TV ad "That was dumb Bob."
You don't usually see things in the press about such nebulous possibilities this far in advance.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if this wasn't a ploy on GMs part to get serious concessions from MS on licensing and possibly even support.
Ultimately, one of the really great benefits to Linux will be providing MS serious competition. This can only serve to make MS more responsive.
Check out Cygnus.
Cygnus has had explosive growth. I would guess that most of their revenues come from support of open-source software. They release and maintain a lot of open-source software.
Why does Cygnus involve itself in commercial closed-source product development and sales? If open-source has been a model that has provided such a profitable market for Cygnus, what is their rationale for creating and selling closed-source products?
Has Cygnus actually performed any marketing studies? Do they know, for a fact, that this actually optimizes their earnings? And, what about the long term? Open-source alternatives are being developed. Will Cygnus be able to compete with the open-source alternatives? Especially when selling into the Linux market?
Time will tell, but I'd like to believe that when open-source alternatives are available, they will ultimately have more features that people need, they will be more stable and I would tend to choose them because I know I can depend on the source if I have a problem and the company peddling it has gone away, or no longer supports the product. I also wonder about releases of this product on different architectures and if I'll ultimately be somehow tied to using some set of Linux distributions to use closed-source products on Linux.
Don't get me wrong. I appreciate all that Cygnus does for open-source. I would like to understand their approach to the marketplace. If there is real data that supports their hybrid approach, I'd like to know about it. Perhaps Cygnus has studied it and sees that there are limitations to providing open-source support only and that to survive you need commercial closed-source products as well. Their original business model was support of open-source products and I'd like to know why they've modified this.
A serious problem I see with being an employee these days is job security and maintaining a marketable skill set.
In today's economy, if you have experience as a contractor there's generally no problem whatsoever in being able to get a contracting assignment.
If you are a long term employee, you tend to cultivate a skill set that's specialized to the environment where you work. Sometimes this set of skills is highly marketable, often it's not.
If you are a contractor, you're much more likely to work on a wide variety of assignments with a range of marketable skills.
Often, employers are looking for people who are versatile with skills in specific newer technologies. This is often more likely to be contractors.
Let's face it, businesses often provide more job security to their contractors, who often have indispensible skills, than they do to employees.
It doesn't take a good employee long to see the problems that their laid-off ex-co-workers have with getting new employment to make them feel like they really need to seriously examine contracting.
A laid-off employee is viewed by new interviewers as a potential problem. Businesses rarely fire underperformers as it leaves you open for all kinds of wrongful dismissal suits and you have to spend a lot of time and expensive effort generating a paper trail to prove that the person is being fired for good cause. It's not a fair perception as businesses often lay off employees because their business is not doing well and this often has nothing to do with the performance of those laid-off. Interviewers are often wondering "Why did they lay this person off?"
Another problem is that a lot of large companies have a policy that prohibits their managers from saying anything good or bad about ex-employees and the question hangs out there large. You can hardly blame businesses for having this policy these days as people have been known to sue over what is generally a positive recommendation. I've known good managers who go out of their way to speak in code to skirt the corporate rules to let people who call about the good laid-off employees. Managers have to be careful though, as this is dealing with inflexible HR rules that can get you fired.
All in all, I really have to agree with the Comment I'm responding to here. If there's no job security, it's harder to keep your skills updated and the pay is so much worse, why would anyone who could contract not contract? A middle ground is working for a services firm like EDS, IBM Global Services, etc. There, you usually get somewhat better pay, you get a lot of opportunity to keep your skills up to date and there's plenty of work so you have job security.
All of these forces, and a bunch more, are why "outsourcing" is so popular these days. American business is just losing the ability to employ good people. Long term, I'd say it's indicative of serious problems.
I wish business would get less risk averse. They should be able to fire poor performers, not lay them off and say good things about people who are good performers who are laid off. A lot of this is just the result of the litigious society we live in. Some of it has to do with upper management's current war on middle management. From what I see, middle management is so overworked in most of today's business. They are the first place upper management looks to get rid of "fat". They are not trusted to make fair hiring/firing decisions. If companies had good policies, trusted their middle management and stood behind their decisions, things might be better. Maybe I'm being unfair to upper management and they are right. They just can't find middle management they can trust when it comes to decisions that could end up in court. These problems are one of the reasons that small businesses have such lower overheads when compared to companies that actually have upper and middle management layers. When you don't have deep pockets, you don't worry so much about law suits.
Thanks, I didn't know about that slashbox. I would still be interested in a feature that had especially highly rated items based on allowing moderators to assign extra points to it.
Perhaps this could be a MetaModerator function. If the Comment were at +5 the MetaModerator would be able to give it an "Exceptional" rating. The Comment with the most "Exceptional"s would get the feature every week. This would relieve the Moderators from having to give up their points for this feature.
I dunno, it's just a thought. I would be strongly influenced by a view that we should let the other new Moderation features work for awhile before introducing lots of changes.