Okay, so the Register has already demolished any idea that this is real-world stuff rather than more empty talk from J. Schwartz. And it's clear that even if Sun were somehow to acquire Novell, the self-destructive corporate culture of the McNealy cultus would destroy any value toute suite.
Nevertheless: this would be a good idea, if Sun had a proper management team.
First, Sun's channel sucks, especially in the small-to-medium business range. Novell, despite its decline in recent years, has a quite good SMB channel and a decent consulting network. For a long time it owned the SMB (and much of the gov't) space, and it still has deep roots there.
Second, with the Java Enterprise System, Sun is trying to break into the LAN administration, groupware, and identity management rackets. Novell knows these spaces better than almost everyone.
Third, between Sun's HIG team and the Ximian monkeys, they'd have an unstoppable Gnome desktop squadron.
Fourth, Novell's managers, in contrast to Sun's, seem to know what they're doing and how to keep their mouths shut. Shanghaing a few of them into the parent company would be nothing but helpful.
Fifth, both companies have struggled to break into the J2EE game for a while; they could combine their heretofore ineffectual efforts and have a fighting chance at making it.
A well-run Sun-Novell teamup would be a very good thing for both companies concerned. It would extend Novell's reach up-market and Sun's down-market; it would combine a rock-solid engineering backbone with an effective distribution channel. Of course, it wouldn't be well-run, and it won't happen.
Same thing with Novell-- look at WordPerfect. Novell has handled SUSE quite nicely-- what says that Sun won't handle Novell nicely?
Novell had an entirely different management team when they acquired SuSE vs. WP. Sun still has McNealy at the helm. Novell got real serious about changing their corporate culture by integrating the Ximian guys into management and moving from Utah to Massachusetts. I doubt you would see a similar self-transformation by Sun.
You (and Bill) are both focusing on developers. Right now that's a smaller and smaller part of the IT industry. Right now the growing part is technicians - the monkeys who install stuff, configure stuff, repair stuff, back stuff up, hack together small-scale web sites and database apps, fiddle with Perl or VB scripts, and generally keep the whole information economy up and running. MS might have did more than anyone else to create these people, and they probably make up the bulk of Slashdot posters. Depending on how you look at it, what open-source means to the IT monkey job market is either:
1. More jobs
2. Fewer but better-paying jobs
3. A wash.
Yes, Linux is hollowing out Sun and RS/6000 in the DB market. The point I'm trying to make is that it doesn't matter to MS if they don't get 100% of the DB market, so long as they can garner higher profits from the base of customers that really integrate SQL Server.
I'm not sure I agree at all. The whole.Net thing is supposed to attack J2EE from the bottom up. This depends on, among other things, lots of SQL Server installations. They've also been trying to deprecate Access in favor of SQL Server, so they very much have their eye on the smaller end of the market.
Not saying it'll kill them; not saying the present RDBMS situation is insuperable. But it's not where they want to be, and doesn't seem to be heading in their direction.
On your response to my other post: I agree that MS is not inevitably heading DEC's way (Ballmer may be dumber than Olsen, but he's smarter where it counts), and I liked your analysis of the IBM thing.
Like I said -- you guys are still fighting the old 90s battle (marketshare) and I think MS is fighting the next one (high-end vs IBM/Oracle). In 5-10 years you might get your 30%, but the victory might be somewhat hollow.
Open-source databases may not be heading for big iron any time soon, but Linux is now the fastest growing platform for RDBMS hosting. And I'm not just talking about MySQL either: it's now the vendor-preferred platform for both Oracle and DB2.
Windows is hardly growing at all for database servers. MS can talk all they want about the bigtime, but right now their efforts in that direction have yet to pay off. Meanwhile they're being squeezed at the lower end, and more and more new deployments are on a platform that SQL Server will never, ever run on.
Another good example (besides IBM) is Apple. In the 80s, they stopped making "the computer for the rest of us" and concentrated on making $5000+ workstations. They survived just fine with lots of cash in the bank.
I believe you're thinking of "Steve Jobs", not "Apple". Apple was a goddamn basket-case by the early 90's.
You know, Microsoft probably knows this and doesn't care because they're set for life. Look at IBM -- They survived the wrath of the entire industry and the loss of their monopoly, and you can bet MS can do similar.
IBM didn't just magically survive. They endured because they had a lot of feet in the trenches, a whole lot of direct feedback from customers, a whole lot of customer trust, a highly diversified business, and a lot of smart executives.
So for example, when their OS/2 division went bust, they were still shipping Windows machines. Even at the MS-imposed markup, their consultants still had the leverage to move them. IBM, practically alone among the big early Java pushers, had the field experience to see that desktop Java was going nowhere, and the foresight to push server-side Java. During the web boom, when other companies were just content to push big servers at the dot-com rubes (Sun), IBM was working on more sustainable solutions like intranet portals.
IBM is not an example of how a huge, cash-rich company survives no matter what. It's an example of how it can survive. On the other hand, you've also got DEC. Not much of a direct channel, only one or two lines of income, executives didn't hear and/or listen to what customers wanted. Now they're gone.
Which one is MS more like?
Re:What I see from this
on
Browser Wars 2004
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
The sleazy side of the 'net always takes advantage of the new-fangled technology we think is gonna be so great and utopian.
We have very different memories of the debut of ActiveX. As I remember it, every sensible commentator out there was saying that ActiveX was a dystopian disaster just waiting to happen. Of course, 'twere the early days of the internet, and sensible commentators were few and far between.
If you actually bothered to RTFA (which almost no one on this thread has seemingly done), you might have noticed that these PCs will be shipped with the "English or Italian" versions of Linspire.
This line will not, for the short term, be targetting the French or German markets, where there's been the most high-profile noise about switching. Rather, it seems to be aimed at Britain (where the noise has been mixed and lower-level) and Italy, where I can't recall any high-profile switch stories.
If there is anything at all to this business plan, it would demonstrate a "trickle-up" story of Linux on the desktop: it's already happening, in small ways that don't make the headlines. Munich and so forth are nice PR, but the revolution will not be televised. It'll probably happen at a dozen dried-octopus dealers in Calabria and Liverpool before it gets past the policy point at the Munich and Paris bureaucracies.
While we're all focused on the high-profile intending-to-switch cases (some of which will probably go bust anyways), desktop Linux is already being deployed on a small scale, for unfashionable uses, by people who aren't interested in being poster-children for the anyone-but-Microsoft crowd, who are making the switch out of business sense, rather than anti-Americanism.
This is how Linux made it into the server market in the last decade: at the beginning, adoption was basically driven by admins surreptitiously installing it in firewalls, print servers, file shares, places where the suits wouldn't notice.
Desktop Linux is like unto a thief in the night. Be watchful for it, but do not expect to see it until it's already made itself at home.
Aren't all the 3d models already scalable vector graphics in a sense?
In a general sense. But in the specific sense of the XML-based WW3C SVG spec, no. There's a processor overhead in parsing XML and rendering it graphically. There's another overhead in rendering 3d graphics. Put those together in something as complex as a desktop environment (or for that matter a game) and you've got big processor/memory churn. We'll probably see it in our lifetime, but at the moment it's not feasible
"Begging the question" used to describe this alleged fallacy of reasoning is bad (modern) English. As a translation of "petitio principii" it probably made sense to 17th century British schoolboys, but "appeal to principle" is much better modern English.
A good reason to avoid the construction altogether is to avoid looking like one of the asshats who cites nizkor.org as an authority - or worse, drawing them out of their pedantic cubbyholes.
It's definitely possible to do; at the moment the overhead involved is high, and will almost certainly remain too high to be used for an entire desktop in the foreseeable future. But yeah, it'll come eventually.
Okay, it's the happy-fun Slashdot thing to talk about how retraded 'lusers' are. Almost as hi-larious as jokes about Clippy and rebooting Windoze machines.
But you know what?
Most developers are retraded too.
This probably includes you, my friend, as you read it in your grease-stained Manga t-shirt. This is not a problem that will be solved by yelling at people about bad code - they're going to produce it anyways, and in droves. The solution to dumb users is good UI design and a sensible permissions architecture. Similarly, the only workable solution to this problem is architectural.
Looking Glass screenshots are fun to drool over and all I guess, but IMHO the way forward is not adding further complexity to the binary-graphics desktop.
Rather, it's SVG. XML-based vector graphics allow developers to parse and manipulate graphics the way you would a web page or a config file. They also make remoting applications even easier than with a binary protocol like X. What does this mean for end users? Not a whole terrible lot on the surface. But it does make it easier for developers to apply consistent look and feel with widely-known text munging tools and also make rich networked applications; so in the end there's a significant but non-apparent user benefit.
Of course the nature of SVG is such that although it looks extremely crisp and neat, it's basically 2D. I think the tradeoff is worth it.
If you're going to go for the extra overhead anyways, SVG is a much bigger win than 2D any day.
There's been some interesting work in cognitive linguistics on linking grammatical categories with neurophysiological structures: for example verb aspect and motor function. I'd imagine we'll discover that the semantics of music is physiological at root, which would have the nice side effect of proving Nietzsche right yet again.
For the ancient Greeks, music and language were inseparable. 'Mousike' meant choral songs, solo songs with or without instrumentation, and poetic recitations. They did have instrumental music - on stringed and reed instruments mostly - but that wasn't in the same class.
'Mousike' was the art of the 'mousai', Muses. 'Mousa' could be a common noun as well as a goddess, meaning "metrical speech". The word is a derivative of 'mna-', "to remember out loud" - same root as "mental" and "memory", which we get from Latin cognates.
You find a similar thing in Vedic Sanskrit. 'Sangita' means "song-and-movement"; it might include instrumental accompaniment, but purely instrumental music was something altogether. Many Greek musical terms also implicitly include the element of dance: Classical Greeks would have found a 'khoros', "chorus" that didn't move to be a contradiction in terms.
In addition to Zanette's work on music and language, there's also some interesting work being done on language and movement (e.g. George Lakoff). Hooking all of these together and getting a picture of how music, cognition and motor function work together is going to be very interesting.
IT is tough in Washington. The good news: the problem about security clearance is almost unique to the DC area. My advice to you, sir, is to outsource yourself. Get out of the Potomac/Patapsco swamp basin as soon as you possibly can.
Slashdot Mirror
Little OS with no future whatsoever.
Okay, so the Register has already demolished any idea that this is real-world stuff rather than more empty talk from J. Schwartz. And it's clear that even if Sun were somehow to acquire Novell, the self-destructive corporate culture of the McNealy cultus would destroy any value toute suite.
Nevertheless: this would be a good idea, if Sun had a proper management team.
First, Sun's channel sucks, especially in the small-to-medium business range. Novell, despite its decline in recent years, has a quite good SMB channel and a decent consulting network. For a long time it owned the SMB (and much of the gov't) space, and it still has deep roots there.
Second, with the Java Enterprise System, Sun is trying to break into the LAN administration, groupware, and identity management rackets. Novell knows these spaces better than almost everyone.
Third, between Sun's HIG team and the Ximian monkeys, they'd have an unstoppable Gnome desktop squadron.
Fourth, Novell's managers, in contrast to Sun's, seem to know what they're doing and how to keep their mouths shut. Shanghaing a few of them into the parent company would be nothing but helpful.
Fifth, both companies have struggled to break into the J2EE game for a while; they could combine their heretofore ineffectual efforts and have a fighting chance at making it.
A well-run Sun-Novell teamup would be a very good thing for both companies concerned. It would extend Novell's reach up-market and Sun's down-market; it would combine a rock-solid engineering backbone with an effective distribution channel. Of course, it wouldn't be well-run, and it won't happen.
Same thing with Novell-- look at WordPerfect. Novell has handled SUSE quite nicely-- what says that Sun won't handle Novell nicely?
Novell had an entirely different management team when they acquired SuSE vs. WP. Sun still has McNealy at the helm. Novell got real serious about changing their corporate culture by integrating the Ximian guys into management and moving from Utah to Massachusetts. I doubt you would see a similar self-transformation by Sun.
It completely invalidates the GPL- you could have a ToS that makes you promise never to distribute the code, making it essentially proprietary.
No. You can set up your own mirror site and work on a fork. If Sveasoft's product is important enough, I expect that someone will.
No book on Black Hats would be complete without an interview with Fyodor in it.
You (and Bill) are both focusing on developers. Right now that's a smaller and smaller part of the IT industry. Right now the growing part is technicians - the monkeys who install stuff, configure stuff, repair stuff, back stuff up, hack together small-scale web sites and database apps, fiddle with Perl or VB scripts, and generally keep the whole information economy up and running. MS might have did more than anyone else to create these people, and they probably make up the bulk of Slashdot posters. Depending on how you look at it, what open-source means to the IT monkey job market is either:
1. More jobs
2. Fewer but better-paying jobs
3. A wash.
IT monkeys are the major drivers of open-source.
Yes, Linux is hollowing out Sun and RS/6000 in the DB market. The point I'm trying to make is that it doesn't matter to MS if they don't get 100% of the DB market, so long as they can garner higher profits from the base of customers that really integrate SQL Server.
.Net thing is supposed to attack J2EE from the bottom up. This depends on, among other things, lots of SQL Server installations. They've also been trying to deprecate Access in favor of SQL Server, so they very much have their eye on the smaller end of the market.
I'm not sure I agree at all. The whole
Not saying it'll kill them; not saying the present RDBMS situation is insuperable. But it's not where they want to be, and doesn't seem to be heading in their direction.
On your response to my other post: I agree that MS is not inevitably heading DEC's way (Ballmer may be dumber than Olsen, but he's smarter where it counts), and I liked your analysis of the IBM thing.
Like I said -- you guys are still fighting the old 90s battle (marketshare) and I think MS is fighting the next one (high-end vs IBM/Oracle). In 5-10 years you might get your 30%, but the victory might be somewhat hollow.
Open-source databases may not be heading for big iron any time soon, but Linux is now the fastest growing platform for RDBMS hosting. And I'm not just talking about MySQL either: it's now the vendor-preferred platform for both Oracle and DB2.
Windows is hardly growing at all for database servers. MS can talk all they want about the bigtime, but right now their efforts in that direction have yet to pay off. Meanwhile they're being squeezed at the lower end, and more and more new deployments are on a platform that SQL Server will never, ever run on.
Another good example (besides IBM) is Apple. In the 80s, they stopped making "the computer for the rest of us" and concentrated on making $5000+ workstations. They survived just fine with lots of cash in the bank.
I believe you're thinking of "Steve Jobs", not "Apple". Apple was a goddamn basket-case by the early 90's.
You know, Microsoft probably knows this and doesn't care because they're set for life. Look at IBM -- They survived the wrath of the entire industry and the loss of their monopoly, and you can bet MS can do similar.
IBM didn't just magically survive. They endured because they had a lot of feet in the trenches, a whole lot of direct feedback from customers, a whole lot of customer trust, a highly diversified business, and a lot of smart executives.
So for example, when their OS/2 division went bust, they were still shipping Windows machines. Even at the MS-imposed markup, their consultants still had the leverage to move them. IBM, practically alone among the big early Java pushers, had the field experience to see that desktop Java was going nowhere, and the foresight to push server-side Java. During the web boom, when other companies were just content to push big servers at the dot-com rubes (Sun), IBM was working on more sustainable solutions like intranet portals.
IBM is not an example of how a huge, cash-rich company survives no matter what. It's an example of how it can survive. On the other hand, you've also got DEC. Not much of a direct channel, only one or two lines of income, executives didn't hear and/or listen to what customers wanted. Now they're gone.
Which one is MS more like?
The sleazy side of the 'net always takes advantage of the new-fangled technology we think is gonna be so great and utopian.
We have very different memories of the debut of ActiveX. As I remember it, every sensible commentator out there was saying that ActiveX was a dystopian disaster just waiting to happen. Of course, 'twere the early days of the internet, and sensible commentators were few and far between.
Should have used Ruby.
You just brought up a good point, sadly it's in my favor. First off, people don't call a can of Pepsi a can of Coke. This is a myth.
Not in the South.
Mother: What kind of Coke do y'all want?
Child1: Sprite.
Child2: Mr. Pibb.
Child3: Pepsi.
(Actual overheard conversation in Theta (thee-ta), TN.) Southern 'coke' is equivalent to US standard 'soda', Midwest 'pop', or New England 'tonic'.
If you actually bothered to RTFA (which almost no one on this thread has seemingly done), you might have noticed that these PCs will be shipped with the "English or Italian" versions of Linspire.
This line will not, for the short term, be targetting the French or German markets, where there's been the most high-profile noise about switching. Rather, it seems to be aimed at Britain (where the noise has been mixed and lower-level) and Italy, where I can't recall any high-profile switch stories.
If there is anything at all to this business plan, it would demonstrate a "trickle-up" story of Linux on the desktop: it's already happening, in small ways that don't make the headlines. Munich and so forth are nice PR, but the revolution will not be televised. It'll probably happen at a dozen dried-octopus dealers in Calabria and Liverpool before it gets past the policy point at the Munich and Paris bureaucracies.
While we're all focused on the high-profile intending-to-switch cases (some of which will probably go bust anyways), desktop Linux is already being deployed on a small scale, for unfashionable uses, by people who aren't interested in being poster-children for the anyone-but-Microsoft crowd, who are making the switch out of business sense, rather than anti-Americanism.
This is how Linux made it into the server market in the last decade: at the beginning, adoption was basically driven by admins surreptitiously installing it in firewalls, print servers, file shares, places where the suits wouldn't notice.
Desktop Linux is like unto a thief in the night. Be watchful for it, but do not expect to see it until it's already made itself at home.
Aren't all the 3d models already scalable vector graphics in a sense?
In a general sense. But in the specific sense of the XML-based WW3C SVG spec, no. There's a processor overhead in parsing XML and rendering it graphically. There's another overhead in rendering 3d graphics. Put those together in something as complex as a desktop environment (or for that matter a game) and you've got big processor/memory churn. We'll probably see it in our lifetime, but at the moment it's not feasible
"Begging the question" used to describe this alleged fallacy of reasoning is bad (modern) English. As a translation of "petitio principii" it probably made sense to 17th century British schoolboys, but "appeal to principle" is much better modern English.
A good reason to avoid the construction altogether is to avoid looking like one of the asshats who cites nizkor.org as an authority - or worse, drawing them out of their pedantic cubbyholes.
One problem is that as a language it lacks elegance and is awkward to build large queries in. More deeply smug relational weenies insist that it does not properly model the relational algebra model pioneered by Ted Codd.
I'm not sufficiently versed in database theory to understand the technical side, but SQL certainly does feel to me like a non-optimal solution.
It was.
It's definitely possible to do; at the moment the overhead involved is high, and will almost certainly remain too high to be used for an entire desktop in the foreseeable future. But yeah, it'll come eventually.
Okay, it's the happy-fun Slashdot thing to talk about how retraded 'lusers' are. Almost as hi-larious as jokes about Clippy and rebooting Windoze machines.
But you know what?
Most developers are retraded too.
This probably includes you, my friend, as you read it in your grease-stained Manga t-shirt. This is not a problem that will be solved by yelling at people about bad code - they're going to produce it anyways, and in droves. The solution to dumb users is good UI design and a sensible permissions architecture. Similarly, the only workable solution to this problem is architectural.
Among a few other minor infelicities:
SVG is a much bigger win than 2D any day.
should read "...than 3D..."
Looking Glass screenshots are fun to drool over and all I guess, but IMHO the way forward is not adding further complexity to the binary-graphics desktop.
Rather, it's SVG. XML-based vector graphics allow developers to parse and manipulate graphics the way you would a web page or a config file. They also make remoting applications even easier than with a binary protocol like X. What does this mean for end users? Not a whole terrible lot on the surface. But it does make it easier for developers to apply consistent look and feel with widely-known text munging tools and also make rich networked applications; so in the end there's a significant but non-apparent user benefit.
Of course the nature of SVG is such that although it looks extremely crisp and neat, it's basically 2D. I think the tradeoff is worth it.
If you're going to go for the extra overhead anyways, SVG is a much bigger win than 2D any day.
If you like, skip it and (re-)read The Birth of Tragedy. Same idea, better stated. ;)
There's been some interesting work in cognitive linguistics on linking grammatical categories with neurophysiological structures: for example verb aspect and motor function. I'd imagine we'll discover that the semantics of music is physiological at root, which would have the nice side effect of proving Nietzsche right yet again.
For the ancient Greeks, music and language were inseparable. 'Mousike' meant choral songs, solo songs with or without instrumentation, and poetic recitations. They did have instrumental music - on stringed and reed instruments mostly - but that wasn't in the same class.
'Mousike' was the art of the 'mousai', Muses. 'Mousa' could be a common noun as well as a goddess, meaning "metrical speech". The word is a derivative of 'mna-', "to remember out loud" - same root as "mental" and "memory", which we get from Latin cognates.
You find a similar thing in Vedic Sanskrit. 'Sangita' means "song-and-movement"; it might include instrumental accompaniment, but purely instrumental music was something altogether. Many Greek musical terms also implicitly include the element of dance: Classical Greeks would have found a 'khoros', "chorus" that didn't move to be a contradiction in terms.
In addition to Zanette's work on music and language, there's also some interesting work being done on language and movement (e.g. George Lakoff). Hooking all of these together and getting a picture of how music, cognition and motor function work together is going to be very interesting.
IT is tough in Washington. The good news: the problem about security clearance is almost unique to the DC area. My advice to you, sir, is to outsource yourself. Get out of the Potomac/Patapsco swamp basin as soon as you possibly can.
(Admittedly tough if you have kids though).