You're right. In theory, it should be nice for products to stand on their own merits, people look beyond the marketing hype, and customers do their own research rather than relying on biased studies funded by companies - be they Microsoft, IBM, Red Hat or Novell.
Sun suffers from the same problem - awesome products marketing terribly; heck, its proven here with idiots making stupid statements that Solaris is only for SPARC, that Sun doesn't sell x86/x64 machines etc. etc. Ignorant goes both ways, and I'm always surprised to seeing the blatent ignorance that exists here.
My experience so far has been different - I don't know what customers in the US are smoking but Novell has historically had good sales outside the US, the big question to ask, maybe they should just simply give up on the US, move their development team and head quarters back to the old German SuSE headquarters and leave the USA to the wrath of Microsoft.
The patent deal I doubt would cause any impact on sales - I mean, unless there are high powered idiots making decisions based on emotive overtones rather than on a factual basis.
If anything it'll be due to the same issue it has always had, terrible marketing, terrible sales people, terrible communication with customers and developers. The lack a leader with charisma and charm that can not only win over customers but developers as well. Everyone of them so far have either been technocrats trying to run a software company like a consumer product company or a geek who completely lacks any idea of business sense, marketing knowledge or the ability to sell products to non-technically minded people.
I bought this HP because it was the best value for money at Harvey Norman; NZ$2599, its fast, reliable, and once Ubuntu was installed on it, I was as happy as larry.
Oh, and quality, I can actually pick up the machine with one hand without the whole thing creaking as with the situation with the el-cheapo Dell machines.
Oh, and price wise compared to Dell, HP came out on top. Better still, I could actually try out Linux on the machine before I bought it, I knew that all the hardware would work as expected.
There is a marked difference between medicine and software patents.
If the pharmacutical industry was run like the software industry it would be a nightmare, with the top of the list issue; no one would know how each drug interacts with each other; if you created a drug which didn't act negatively with another drug, you would end up vendors suing each other.
Lets ALSO remember that the large pharmacutical company in the world only has approximately 6% of the marketplace; there is no player which has 90% of the market. The pharmacutal industry is brutal, ask any startup.
The problem I have isn't necessarily the 'price setting' but whether the cure is worse than the disease itself.
For me, if you're going to demand Microsoft open up its protocols, you should demand that all software companies do like wise; to fully disclose their whole protocol and file format specifications freely available for anyone to download and implement without the requirement of NDA or payments to be made.
Specifications do *NOT* mean opensource, I am saying that now before some halfwitt comes out of their cave/rock declaring that to be the case, the simple fact is, you can disclose a specification without needing to disclose the source code.
Which I don't believe - all it tells me is that Warner is a very inefficient company when it comes to how it manages its human resources and assets (aka, the so-called artists).
In New Zealand they do no advertising at all any more - I remember years and years ago they use to advertise the new so-and-so album on television with an 'out now!' jingle to it, but now, the only information you get as to whether a new song has been put out is either by watching C4 or via posters put up in music stores.
Having taken all the 'old things' they used to do, out of the equation, it isn't as though their marketing costs (which are normally quite large) have anything to do with it, their manufacturing costs would be lucky to be 30cents per cd.
When you taken into account in New Zealand that new release cds cost $34.95, they're still making a massive profit margin; if there is anything to blame for poor profits and margins is bad management from the top - when in doubt, bash the fictional mass piraters rather than taking on the responsibility for failure.
oh, and multi-million dollar salaries for producing subpar profits is hardly what I call responsible management. How about hiring someone who will be a CEO for $200,000-$300,000 and is passsionate about the music being made, and motivated by providing a good product - if you concerntrate on the product, provide a good quality one, the profits will roll in on their own; many bands have proven that already by only releasing their music online and yet making a profit and raising their profile overnight.
Doth big wigs at media companies complain too much.
Linux and Desktop should *NEVER* be used in the same sentence, unless it is preceeded by 'painful experience and lacking mainstream application vendor support".
OpenOffice.org is a buggy bloated mess and the applications I rely on, don't exist for Linux - no, I don't want 'good enough' - I want the actual applicaiton on Linux, natively.
The issue is about SMB and implementing it, and that includes for example, the authentication algorithm used and so forth; there are big changes in the SMB implementation in Vista which will require changes to Samba.
Microsoft is quite entitled to develop a new authetication scheme and patent it; if you want someone to blame for the patent frezzy, blame your government of the US of A.
When he refers to Linux, he is referring to the whole distribution - he isn't going after Fedora, Ubuntu community or 'free' distributions but after the Novells and Red Hats who are reselling the software which contains patented algorithms.
I wouldn't be surprised that Samba includes panteted algorithm to provide compatibility with Microsofts own SMB implementation - not a malicious programme, but a reality that maybe the better thing would be to rather than attack Microsoft, to attack the idea of software patents.
As for why Microsoft patents things; if they don't, someone else will; like the whole stupid thing that occured between Microsoft and that scum-sucking, patent sqauatting organisations like Eolas who produce absolutely NOTHING and then come up with some broadranged patent which could cover any dam thing that is made up of atoms or created by man.
No body has died because it can take up to, and some times longer than 10 years for CJD to manefest itself into humans; a person can go through life, then *bam* all the symptoms come at once.
Want to know why Joe and Jane of generation X isn't interest in space travel? because what is being done is absolutely pathetic and boring to the point that the paint drying channel has more viewers than during a launch to the international space station.
I think the Simpsons episode, when Homer is put into space, put it best: "to find out the effect that zero gravity has on tiny screws" - wow wee, pass me my ipod quickly or otherwise I might decide to chew on the barrel of a gun.
How about having some decent damn goals; building a huge fucking space ship, build a space base that is HUGE to the point that the government no longer wastes money gallivanting around the middle east playing 'geo political engineer', dream about a space station, terraforming etc. on Mars.
I mean, if you're going to have a space vision, how about making it remotely bloody interesting to generation X; I sure, and many of my contemporaries would actually give a damn about space if it actually had some 'edge' factor to it - you know, remotely, but making possibly, the whole idea of travelling through space and migrating to different planets.
Sure, in reality, it might take 2-3 generations, but atleast it would maintain a level of interest in the future rather than people losing interest simply because the scientists have forgotten to dream a little, and show a little vision for the next 100+ years of human development.
Just a couple of points (no necessarily directed at you):
1) Who ever the coward who marked me down, show your face, or are you yet another Linux fanboy unwilling to accept a little criticism of your beloved OS; I have no love for Windows, Linux or what have you; I use what gets the job done, out of the box, with minimum work required; and if Windows does that, then so be it; stop the religious jihad, and start focusing on the problems.
2) Why isn't that WPA information on the ubuntu website? the ubuntu documentation is absolutely crap - would I help out to fix it up? yeap, but not if it requires me to jump through hundreds of hoops just to get something in there.
3) The ipw3945 driver has been available for quite some time; sure, you can distribute the firmware, but there is nothing stopping a distribution like Fedora from including it with their kernel binary; also, why don't they set things up so that when the firmware is installed, you don't need to edit 1/2 dozen files just to make sure that the regulatory daemon loads before the wpa_supplicant, but at the same time, ensuring that the wpa_supplicant is excuted before the eth1-up script is executed.
Its about making sure that your configuration is wise enough to take into account when new drivers are added, and how to handle those new drivers that have been added, so that the different parts are loaded in the correct order - if MacOS X, Windows and others can do the job, why can't Linux?
4) The problem with Linux, more correctly UNIX is that documentation maintainers make grand assumptions, assuming that everyone has atleast 2 years of UNIX under their belt and a keen interest in tinkering around with their system to get things working - the fact is, those who are like me, sure, we have the technical know how, but at the same time, we don't want to sit there for ages trying to get something working, we just want to follow some instructions, and voila, it works.
I've spent a good weekend of my life trying to get the wireless working with Fedora Core 6, along with Ubuntu; you're really going to attract developers with the half assed, half baked crap that seems to being pushed out by the opensource developers? get the damn product working properly, then maybe those "Microsoft developers" will view Linux as a viable platform to develop on, rather than some operating system for those who wish to waste a whole weekend on trying to get the damn parts working properly.
As for Shuttleworth, its about bloody time he piped down from his grand standing and actually got his damn distribution working correctly out of the box rather than jumping on every Microsoft and competitior bashing bandwagon that goes past his doorway, and instead, actually correct the deficiencies in his distribution; like the lack of WPA configuration and setup - no wpa-gui sucks, its broken and doesn't work.
The day I can dump a ditribution on his oh-so-generic laptop (Toshiba A100) and everything works out of the box, without distorted sound, constant wireless network dropping - then Linux will have made a success on the desktop, until then, it'll be relegated to the server and the desktops of those with way too much time on their hands.
Yeah, I'll get marked down, and a jihad declared on my ass because I *dare* question the almighty penguin agenda, but for christ sake, part of being an adult is accepting praise as well as acknowledging deficiencies and correcting them as they arrise - something which the Linux/OpenSource community is no very good at.
The problem is this; not the idea of providing an integrated solution; IBM, SUN and HP prove that you can do it quite profitably; the problem with SGI is that they kept thinking they could sell $14000 desktops which barely competed with $5000 intel based workstations.
The first hits came from SUN in the form of their 'low end' workstations, coupled that with software moving to alternative platforms outside SGI, SGI was stuck in a situation where they chose to stick to their guns rather than standing back, looking at the bigger picture and realising that they either have to massively cut prices, and relying on volumes to boost profits off the smaller margins, and make up the rest by pushing their software and services.
Also, their software were a rip-off, NZ$25,000 for a C/C++ compiler? what the hell is SGI smoking? IBM and Sun NEVER charged that amount, and provided superior and faster hardware than SGI did; if it were anything, it was stupidity that killed it.
Lets be completely honest; 99% of security problems with Microsoft have little to do with code quality and everything to do with default settings; hell, the IE development team came out and explained some of the stupid ActiveX settings they had - assuming that 'no one would ever do evil'.
Internet Explorer has finally divorced the two, so that there is now seperation, the security defaults are now set to 'anal retension' rather than 'as open as a $2 hooker' - hopefully that'll mean, coupled with NX enabled, and the improved compiling technology, that security should be vastly improved.
Lets also remember the old story of 'man in glass houses shouldn't throw stones' - there have been some beaut's when it has come to security issues with all browsers, so lets before one starts to launch the usual anti-Microsoft jihad, we all sit back like adults and look at the bigger picture:)
There is sometimes reasons to outsource; the logic is, thats not a key focus of our business, so why do we have a department that costs us x amout nper year, where as with an oursourced company, the costs go up and down, depending on how much we use them (based on volume).
For example, Progressive Enterprises (which is now owned by Woolworths Australia) outsource their employee payment processing to a company, rather than having a dedicated staff for the job, they have a fixed cost with the company who provides the services, so in the long run its cheaper.
With that being said, however, the problem with IT is that it is different; it is alot more complicated than outsourcing employee payment processing, and if you cock it up, because IT touches every facit of corporate ladder, everyone in the organisation can feel the effects of the cock up - its not a good thing, believe me.
The solution, managers need to realise that once they've entered a realm which they're unsure of, they should ask for advice; talk to their IT personal, and get their feedback, now sure, some will respond negatively, whilst those who are professional will give honest and frank advice on the merits and downside of going down a certain avenue in the quest to save money.
Atleast one with with asking your own IT staff, atleast their assessment of the risk is going to be alot more frank than asking a so-called 'consultant' who has vested interests in half a dozen service providers, who provide him or her with kick backs with each customer he or she forwards.
And people wonder why I didn't use their website. Russia is wanting to get into the WTO, and if means cracking down on piracy rings such as allofmp3, simply for apperances, then they will - all I have to say, pray that they don't come after those who purchase music off them.
When I talked about concerns regarding allofmp3, I was shunned off as an MPIAA supporter, my karma went down into the shitter - but is it really worth the risk given the number 'gray' websites which could, at a later date, deemed to be illega..
I don't know about you, but I prefer good old fashioned cds; atleast then you know what you're purchasing.
1) The time was too early for a Linux distribution or a Linux based application suite; remember that when this came out, it was around 2000; Linux had just started to gain traction outside the ISP realms in regards to server uses; they were too early to make any money off the product give the small amount of market there was to begin with.
2) The failure of Corel had nothing to do with Linux and more to do with the lack of any strong direction; yes, the Wordperfect buyout was a good purchase but at the same time, the idea of the Netwinder, Corel Wordperfect Suite for Java, coupled with some other terrible decisions, were the main thing that broke Corel.
Had Corel focused on its core market, possibly expand it using Wordperfect Suite; they wouldn't be hugely profitable, but at the same time, however, they would be making a modest return.
3) Had the money not been wasted on the above said ventures, Corel would have had enough cash in the bank, for example, to purchase Borland, and create an end to end company, from development tools, to graphics applications to office suites; marketing Delphi as an alternative RAD solution to Visual Basic (and C#), Wordperfect Suite as an alternative to Microsoft Office etc. the ability to leverage the fact that they could offer better complete packages for businesses.
Its too bad that the bad decisions of yesturday castrate the company today by way of not being able to make good acquisitions to expand their business beyond they niche they've carved out for themselves now.
You hint it right on the noggen; the number of so-called adults who seem to have the maturity of a child seems to be an increasing phenomenon in our society; I just look down the road and on the news; the 'everyone elses fault except my own' syndrome. There are people on the benefit having children, knowing full well they don't have the funds to pay for the associated costs, we have couples having more children than they can afford, then demanding that the tax payer for the bill for their lifestyle choice.
All this is actually a biproduct of our modern day welfare state, and the nanny state complex which people have adopted, that we shouldn't take responsibility for our actions, because good old nanny state will always be there to whipe out bottoms, and stop us from doing moronic things.
Regarding smoking, the health issues have been known for over 60 years, if people CHOOSE to live under a rock, and REFUSE to take in the information that is readily out there, who is to blame? I don't blame the cigarette companies - they're like any other company, make their product look sexy, close over any possible health issues, and keep on pushing.
If you're going to blame cigarette for the associated health costs of smoking, why not allow people to sue fast food companies who fail to put warning labels and advertise that if their product is consumed in excess, it could cause health problems? why not extend it to the confectionary and snake food companies? heck, why not put a big sticker on cars that warn that due to the bad driving of others, you could possibly die!
Honestly, it is getting to the point where I ask, when are people going to take responsibility for their actions - that is the cornerstone of being an adult, making your choices and accepting the consequences of those choices.
The original announcement then was that WinFS would not ship in the RTM of Microsoft Windows, and instead, it'll be offered at a later date, as either a seperate download or part of a service pack.
The new article says that they won't ship it at all, not even as a seperate download.
So lets recap, it goes from being included to shipping seperately to not shipping at all.
They really do exist but consider the context. The camps they are talking about are for urban grade school children who would be unlikely to work anyway during the 3 months of summer vacation and are considered too young to supervise themselves while their parents work. They spend 1 or 2 weeks in small groups sorted by age and gender living in a cabin with a counselor who is young enough for them to identify with and not be what they would consider an adult. The movie Meatballs was actually pretty close to what I remember if exaggerated. The best time I had was the year several members of my cabin were gamers and we played D&D every day.
That being the case, shouldn't the issue then be that the school year in the US needs to be re-examined so that you don't have the holidays all lumped at once - adopt the same 4 term system used in Australia, New Zealand, and IIRC, the UK?
I thought this whole 'summer camp' thing was a myth, but they actually exist over there
Why the hell do these places exist? I mean, good lord, when I was a teenager, during the holidays, I worked, went to the movies and kept my self occupied, without the need of my parents spending money hand over fist to some over hyped establishment.
Geeze, I really wonder sometimes why parents have kids if all they do is boot their kids off to a camp each year, simply to avoid them.
They're just not interested; when I was at Polytech/University, almost 1/2 my lecturers were female; one worked for Digital, another worked for Databank with the original design of the system which enabled all the banks computers in New Zealand to communicate with each other.
Sorry, the issue isn't about 'encouragement', females already know that these things exist; the thing is, females tend to be more, how can I say, balanced in their approach to life; they work in IT, but it doesn't mean that their whole life and interests revolve around IT; heck, I work in sales, but it doesn't mean I actually enjoy tinking with what I sell (selling wine was the exception though), same goes for women.
There is a difference between being a programmer, and being a programmer who also sees it as a hobby; for a large number, they programme as a occupation, but when they get home, they're mothers, wives; they have interests that at external to their occupation. If anything, I think men need to rebalance their life, between their employment and interests.
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You're right. In theory, it should be nice for products to stand on their own merits, people look beyond the marketing hype, and customers do their own research rather than relying on biased studies funded by companies - be they Microsoft, IBM, Red Hat or Novell.
Sun suffers from the same problem - awesome products marketing terribly; heck, its proven here with idiots making stupid statements that Solaris is only for SPARC, that Sun doesn't sell x86/x64 machines etc. etc. Ignorant goes both ways, and I'm always surprised to seeing the blatent ignorance that exists here.
My experience so far has been different - I don't know what customers in the US are smoking but Novell has historically had good sales outside the US, the big question to ask, maybe they should just simply give up on the US, move their development team and head quarters back to the old German SuSE headquarters and leave the USA to the wrath of Microsoft.
The patent deal I doubt would cause any impact on sales - I mean, unless there are high powered idiots making decisions based on emotive overtones rather than on a factual basis.
If anything it'll be due to the same issue it has always had, terrible marketing, terrible sales people, terrible communication with customers and developers. The lack a leader with charisma and charm that can not only win over customers but developers as well. Everyone of them so far have either been technocrats trying to run a software company like a consumer product company or a geek who completely lacks any idea of business sense, marketing knowledge or the ability to sell products to non-technically minded people.
I'd like to know why they compared a Woodcrest Xeon, circa June 2006 to the latest and greatest Opteron of today.
I bought this HP because it was the best value for money at Harvey Norman; NZ$2599, its fast, reliable, and once Ubuntu was installed on it, I was as happy as larry.
Oh, and quality, I can actually pick up the machine with one hand without the whole thing creaking as with the situation with the el-cheapo Dell machines.
Oh, and price wise compared to Dell, HP came out on top. Better still, I could actually try out Linux on the machine before I bought it, I knew that all the hardware would work as expected.
There is a marked difference between medicine and software patents.
If the pharmacutical industry was run like the software industry it would be a nightmare, with the top of the list issue; no one would know how each drug interacts with each other; if you created a drug which didn't act negatively with another drug, you would end up vendors suing each other.
Lets ALSO remember that the large pharmacutical company in the world only has approximately 6% of the marketplace; there is no player which has 90% of the market. The pharmacutal industry is brutal, ask any startup.
The problem I have isn't necessarily the 'price setting' but whether the cure is worse than the disease itself.
For me, if you're going to demand Microsoft open up its protocols, you should demand that all software companies do like wise; to fully disclose their whole protocol and file format specifications freely available for anyone to download and implement without the requirement of NDA or payments to be made.
Specifications do *NOT* mean opensource, I am saying that now before some halfwitt comes out of their cave/rock declaring that to be the case, the simple fact is, you can disclose a specification without needing to disclose the source code.
Which I don't believe - all it tells me is that Warner is a very inefficient company when it comes to how it manages its human resources and assets (aka, the so-called artists).
In New Zealand they do no advertising at all any more - I remember years and years ago they use to advertise the new so-and-so album on television with an 'out now!' jingle to it, but now, the only information you get as to whether a new song has been put out is either by watching C4 or via posters put up in music stores.
Having taken all the 'old things' they used to do, out of the equation, it isn't as though their marketing costs (which are normally quite large) have anything to do with it, their manufacturing costs would be lucky to be 30cents per cd.
When you taken into account in New Zealand that new release cds cost $34.95, they're still making a massive profit margin; if there is anything to blame for poor profits and margins is bad management from the top - when in doubt, bash the fictional mass piraters rather than taking on the responsibility for failure.
oh, and multi-million dollar salaries for producing subpar profits is hardly what I call responsible management. How about hiring someone who will be a CEO for $200,000-$300,000 and is passsionate about the music being made, and motivated by providing a good product - if you concerntrate on the product, provide a good quality one, the profits will roll in on their own; many bands have proven that already by only releasing their music online and yet making a profit and raising their profile overnight.
Doth big wigs at media companies complain too much.
Linux and Desktop should *NEVER* be used in the same sentence, unless it is preceeded by 'painful experience and lacking mainstream application vendor support".
OpenOffice.org is a buggy bloated mess and the applications I rely on, don't exist for Linux - no, I don't want 'good enough' - I want the actual applicaiton on Linux, natively.
I think you need to do some reading - big time.
The issue is about SMB and implementing it, and that includes for example, the authentication algorithm used and so forth; there are big changes in the SMB implementation in Vista which will require changes to Samba.
Microsoft is quite entitled to develop a new authetication scheme and patent it; if you want someone to blame for the patent frezzy, blame your government of the US of A.
When he refers to Linux, he is referring to the whole distribution - he isn't going after Fedora, Ubuntu community or 'free' distributions but after the Novells and Red Hats who are reselling the software which contains patented algorithms.
I wouldn't be surprised that Samba includes panteted algorithm to provide compatibility with Microsofts own SMB implementation - not a malicious programme, but a reality that maybe the better thing would be to rather than attack Microsoft, to attack the idea of software patents.
As for why Microsoft patents things; if they don't, someone else will; like the whole stupid thing that occured between Microsoft and that scum-sucking, patent sqauatting organisations like Eolas who produce absolutely NOTHING and then come up with some broadranged patent which could cover any dam thing that is made up of atoms or created by man.
No body has died because it can take up to, and some times longer than 10 years for CJD to manefest itself into humans; a person can go through life, then *bam* all the symptoms come at once.
Want to know why Joe and Jane of generation X isn't interest in space travel? because what is being done is absolutely pathetic and boring to the point that the paint drying channel has more viewers than during a launch to the international space station.
I think the Simpsons episode, when Homer is put into space, put it best: "to find out the effect that zero gravity has on tiny screws" - wow wee, pass me my ipod quickly or otherwise I might decide to chew on the barrel of a gun.
How about having some decent damn goals; building a huge fucking space ship, build a space base that is HUGE to the point that the government no longer wastes money gallivanting around the middle east playing 'geo political engineer', dream about a space station, terraforming etc. on Mars.
I mean, if you're going to have a space vision, how about making it remotely bloody interesting to generation X; I sure, and many of my contemporaries would actually give a damn about space if it actually had some 'edge' factor to it - you know, remotely, but making possibly, the whole idea of travelling through space and migrating to different planets.
Sure, in reality, it might take 2-3 generations, but atleast it would maintain a level of interest in the future rather than people losing interest simply because the scientists have forgotten to dream a little, and show a little vision for the next 100+ years of human development.
Just a couple of points (no necessarily directed at you):
1) Who ever the coward who marked me down, show your face, or are you yet another Linux fanboy unwilling to accept a little criticism of your beloved OS; I have no love for Windows, Linux or what have you; I use what gets the job done, out of the box, with minimum work required; and if Windows does that, then so be it; stop the religious jihad, and start focusing on the problems.
2) Why isn't that WPA information on the ubuntu website? the ubuntu documentation is absolutely crap - would I help out to fix it up? yeap, but not if it requires me to jump through hundreds of hoops just to get something in there.
3) The ipw3945 driver has been available for quite some time; sure, you can distribute the firmware, but there is nothing stopping a distribution like Fedora from including it with their kernel binary; also, why don't they set things up so that when the firmware is installed, you don't need to edit 1/2 dozen files just to make sure that the regulatory daemon loads before the wpa_supplicant, but at the same time, ensuring that the wpa_supplicant is excuted before the eth1-up script is executed.
Its about making sure that your configuration is wise enough to take into account when new drivers are added, and how to handle those new drivers that have been added, so that the different parts are loaded in the correct order - if MacOS X, Windows and others can do the job, why can't Linux?
4) The problem with Linux, more correctly UNIX is that documentation maintainers make grand assumptions, assuming that everyone has atleast 2 years of UNIX under their belt and a keen interest in tinkering around with their system to get things working - the fact is, those who are like me, sure, we have the technical know how, but at the same time, we don't want to sit there for ages trying to get something working, we just want to follow some instructions, and voila, it works.
I've spent a good weekend of my life trying to get the wireless working with Fedora Core 6, along with Ubuntu; you're really going to attract developers with the half assed, half baked crap that seems to being pushed out by the opensource developers? get the damn product working properly, then maybe those "Microsoft developers" will view Linux as a viable platform to develop on, rather than some operating system for those who wish to waste a whole weekend on trying to get the damn parts working properly.
As for Shuttleworth, its about bloody time he piped down from his grand standing and actually got his damn distribution working correctly out of the box rather than jumping on every Microsoft and competitior bashing bandwagon that goes past his doorway, and instead, actually correct the deficiencies in his distribution; like the lack of WPA configuration and setup - no wpa-gui sucks, its broken and doesn't work.
The day I can dump a ditribution on his oh-so-generic laptop (Toshiba A100) and everything works out of the box, without distorted sound, constant wireless network dropping - then Linux will have made a success on the desktop, until then, it'll be relegated to the server and the desktops of those with way too much time on their hands.
Yeah, I'll get marked down, and a jihad declared on my ass because I *dare* question the almighty penguin agenda, but for christ sake, part of being an adult is accepting praise as well as acknowledging deficiencies and correcting them as they arrise - something which the Linux/OpenSource community is no very good at.
The problem is this; not the idea of providing an integrated solution; IBM, SUN and HP prove that you can do it quite profitably; the problem with SGI is that they kept thinking they could sell $14000 desktops which barely competed with $5000 intel based workstations.
The first hits came from SUN in the form of their 'low end' workstations, coupled that with software moving to alternative platforms outside SGI, SGI was stuck in a situation where they chose to stick to their guns rather than standing back, looking at the bigger picture and realising that they either have to massively cut prices, and relying on volumes to boost profits off the smaller margins, and make up the rest by pushing their software and services.
Also, their software were a rip-off, NZ$25,000 for a C/C++ compiler? what the hell is SGI smoking? IBM and Sun NEVER charged that amount, and provided superior and faster hardware than SGI did; if it were anything, it was stupidity that killed it.
Lets be completely honest; 99% of security problems with Microsoft have little to do with code quality and everything to do with default settings; hell, the IE development team came out and explained some of the stupid ActiveX settings they had - assuming that 'no one would ever do evil'.
:)
Internet Explorer has finally divorced the two, so that there is now seperation, the security defaults are now set to 'anal retension' rather than 'as open as a $2 hooker' - hopefully that'll mean, coupled with NX enabled, and the improved compiling technology, that security should be vastly improved.
Lets also remember the old story of 'man in glass houses shouldn't throw stones' - there have been some beaut's when it has come to security issues with all browsers, so lets before one starts to launch the usual anti-Microsoft jihad, we all sit back like adults and look at the bigger picture
There is sometimes reasons to outsource; the logic is, thats not a key focus of our business, so why do we have a department that costs us x amout nper year, where as with an oursourced company, the costs go up and down, depending on how much we use them (based on volume).
For example, Progressive Enterprises (which is now owned by Woolworths Australia) outsource their employee payment processing to a company, rather than having a dedicated staff for the job, they have a fixed cost with the company who provides the services, so in the long run its cheaper.
With that being said, however, the problem with IT is that it is different; it is alot more complicated than outsourcing employee payment processing, and if you cock it up, because IT touches every facit of corporate ladder, everyone in the organisation can feel the effects of the cock up - its not a good thing, believe me.
The solution, managers need to realise that once they've entered a realm which they're unsure of, they should ask for advice; talk to their IT personal, and get their feedback, now sure, some will respond negatively, whilst those who are professional will give honest and frank advice on the merits and downside of going down a certain avenue in the quest to save money.
Atleast one with with asking your own IT staff, atleast their assessment of the risk is going to be alot more frank than asking a so-called 'consultant' who has vested interests in half a dozen service providers, who provide him or her with kick backs with each customer he or she forwards.
And people wonder why I didn't use their website. Russia is wanting to get into the WTO, and if means cracking down on piracy rings such as allofmp3, simply for apperances, then they will - all I have to say, pray that they don't come after those who purchase music off them.
When I talked about concerns regarding allofmp3, I was shunned off as an MPIAA supporter, my karma went down into the shitter - but is it really worth the risk given the number 'gray' websites which could, at a later date, deemed to be illega..
I don't know about you, but I prefer good old fashioned cds; atleast then you know what you're purchasing.
1) The time was too early for a Linux distribution or a Linux based application suite; remember that when this came out, it was around 2000; Linux had just started to gain traction outside the ISP realms in regards to server uses; they were too early to make any money off the product give the small amount of market there was to begin with.
2) The failure of Corel had nothing to do with Linux and more to do with the lack of any strong direction; yes, the Wordperfect buyout was a good purchase but at the same time, the idea of the Netwinder, Corel Wordperfect Suite for Java, coupled with some other terrible decisions, were the main thing that broke Corel.
Had Corel focused on its core market, possibly expand it using Wordperfect Suite; they wouldn't be hugely profitable, but at the same time, however, they would be making a modest return.
3) Had the money not been wasted on the above said ventures, Corel would have had enough cash in the bank, for example, to purchase Borland, and create an end to end company, from development tools, to graphics applications to office suites; marketing Delphi as an alternative RAD solution to Visual Basic (and C#), Wordperfect Suite as an alternative to Microsoft Office etc. the ability to leverage the fact that they could offer better complete packages for businesses.
Its too bad that the bad decisions of yesturday castrate the company today by way of not being able to make good acquisitions to expand their business beyond they niche they've carved out for themselves now.
You hint it right on the noggen; the number of so-called adults who seem to have the maturity of a child seems to be an increasing phenomenon in our society; I just look down the road and on the news; the 'everyone elses fault except my own' syndrome. There are people on the benefit having children, knowing full well they don't have the funds to pay for the associated costs, we have couples having more children than they can afford, then demanding that the tax payer for the bill for their lifestyle choice.
All this is actually a biproduct of our modern day welfare state, and the nanny state complex which people have adopted, that we shouldn't take responsibility for our actions, because good old nanny state will always be there to whipe out bottoms, and stop us from doing moronic things.
Regarding smoking, the health issues have been known for over 60 years, if people CHOOSE to live under a rock, and REFUSE to take in the information that is readily out there, who is to blame? I don't blame the cigarette companies - they're like any other company, make their product look sexy, close over any possible health issues, and keep on pushing.
If you're going to blame cigarette for the associated health costs of smoking, why not allow people to sue fast food companies who fail to put warning labels and advertise that if their product is consumed in excess, it could cause health problems? why not extend it to the confectionary and snake food companies? heck, why not put a big sticker on cars that warn that due to the bad driving of others, you could possibly die!
Honestly, it is getting to the point where I ask, when are people going to take responsibility for their actions - that is the cornerstone of being an adult, making your choices and accepting the consequences of those choices.The original announcement then was that WinFS would not ship in the RTM of Microsoft Windows, and instead, it'll be offered at a later date, as either a seperate download or part of a service pack.
The new article says that they won't ship it at all, not even as a seperate download.
So lets recap, it goes from being included to shipping seperately to not shipping at all.
That being the case, shouldn't the issue then be that the school year in the US needs to be re-examined so that you don't have the holidays all lumped at once - adopt the same 4 term system used in Australia, New Zealand, and IIRC, the UK?
I thought this whole 'summer camp' thing was a myth, but they actually exist over there
Why the hell do these places exist? I mean, good lord, when I was a teenager, during the holidays, I worked, went to the movies and kept my self occupied, without the need of my parents spending money hand over fist to some over hyped establishment.
Geeze, I really wonder sometimes why parents have kids if all they do is boot their kids off to a camp each year, simply to avoid them.
They're just not interested; when I was at Polytech/University, almost 1/2 my lecturers were female; one worked for Digital, another worked for Databank with the original design of the system which enabled all the banks computers in New Zealand to communicate with each other.
Sorry, the issue isn't about 'encouragement', females already know that these things exist; the thing is, females tend to be more, how can I say, balanced in their approach to life; they work in IT, but it doesn't mean that their whole life and interests revolve around IT; heck, I work in sales, but it doesn't mean I actually enjoy tinking with what I sell (selling wine was the exception though), same goes for women.
There is a difference between being a programmer, and being a programmer who also sees it as a hobby; for a large number, they programme as a occupation, but when they get home, they're mothers, wives; they have interests that at external to their occupation. If anything, I think men need to rebalance their life, between their employment and interests.
You know you want to...outsource the development and production.....
;)
To a low cost country.....
In the middle east.....
To win over friends.....
oooh, Iran looks promising