Huh? Duoploy? I assume you mean Microsoft and Google?
Yes, that's what TS said.
Are you suggesting that having just two companies competing against each other for market share has no advantages compared to a monopoly?
No, the point TS was making is simply that for any given market, more competitors > fewer competitors. Therefore any way you slice it, this proposed merger would be better for Microsoft/Google than the search market in which they compete.
Look at Intel/AMD.
Intel and AMD have not until very recently shared a level playing field. 5 years ago Intel owned 80% of the PC processor market, to AMD's sub-20%. Once both market and marketshare stabilize (limiting new growth opportunity), both companies will begin to focus on minimizing risk, establishing price equilibrium and direct R&D spending at new markets in search of new growth opportunities. Only if there are no such growth opportunities will these competitors turn up the heat on one another.
The only problem is if they work together to control the market and then share each others profits, but I cannot see that happening.
While outright boardroom collusion may not occur (right away), the incentives and conditions associated with duopoly competition make fertile ground for tacit collusion.
What do CPU cycles and information have in common? Both are commodities. Once a commodities market is established, production itself only represents a growth opportunity during periods of increased global demand. Innovation is a calculated risk such companies are often not willing to take when tacit collusion promises steady cash flow.
Re:It's not as bad as Dilbert.
on
The Living Dilbert?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
In job interviews I tell the questioner they're being interviewed just as much as I am - the ones who get offended are likely to be idiots about other things, whereas the folks who understand it's about matching styles have a good chance of understanding my approach to the job.
If you sense your interviewer is not already conscious of this fact, that in itself should raise a red flag. A competent manager will put her best and brightest in the interviewing chair for two reasons:
Good interviewers ask the right questions and get insightful responses.
"A lot of times, you can add something graphical in two minutes and the customer might wet themselves when they see it. On the other hand, you can spend two months knocking out major requirements in back-end functionality and the customer will probably ask you why they're paying you since nothing's changed in the interface."
Amen to that brother.
I just had the same experience again the other day. The "CEO" turns to me and says, "So for tha past week you've only worked on the login page?"
I just wanted to scream him down.
As someone with merely 10 years of experience in this business, I have no symapthy. If you find yourself in this situation, it is most likely due to one or more of the following:
You are not accurately estimating project effort.
You are not accurately figuring non-project related accountabilities into your project plan.
You are not adequately addressing slippage/feature creep, and/or not communicating these risks to the powers that be.
You are not setting proper expectations regarding deliverable milestone targets.
You are not following a proven software development lifecycle model.
Someone with actual software development experience prepared a reasonable estimate and you are simply incapable of doing the work.
You somehow managed to do everything right, but happen to be working with an incompetent client/employer/team. In that case, your project is doomed to failure -- you are wasting your time and need to find another assignment immediately.
When you are to blame, you don't scream down anyone but yourself.
Re:Money doesn't always get you everything
on
Apache down, IIS up
·
· Score: 1
It's not so much a question of buy-off as it is an offering of free services in exchange for mindshare. Apache's strong numbers in this area lend credibility to Microsoft's competition in the server market. If Microsoft can reverse these statistics by simply giving away services for free, at best it accelerates its growth in this market at the expense of its competition, at worst it writes-off the failed campaign as a small operating loss.
We're now making serious progress on open sourcing Java (and despite the cynics, using a GPL license is very much *on* the table), while focusing the debate on what matters most: not access to lines of code (that's already widely available), but ensuring compatibility.
And with simple scripts available to add proprietary codecs to Ubuntu, there are few to no reasons to pay for Linspire, and pay again for access to their library of OSS apps.
Few reasons, but good reasons: Freespire will have done its due diligence to ensure your codecs are properly licensed, whether free as in speech, beer, or crack. 'Free as in Beer' may yet prove the gateway drug of the software world.
There are a number of reasons this is the wrong sort of question to ask.
1. The desktop fills two mutually-exclusive roles: Productivity & Entertainment. When used as a productivity tool, you want all productivity tools within immediate reach -- you don't want 80% of your productivity tools available under one partition, with the other 20% available after a reboot. This goes for your music library as well if you like to listen to music while multitasking. As an entertainment tool, you might use your system to watch video, or play games -- both of which the typical user will do to the exclusion of productivity, so having to reboot to access 99% of one's productivity software is far less an inconvenience when this is the case. There is also the question of file access. I may be completely mistaken (as these things can change quickly), about this but last I chekced writing to an HFS partiiton from XP, or an NTFS partition from OSX are not vendor-supported activities, and you will spend time either configuring both OSes to enable this kind of file-access (possibly losing data in the process), or living in a world in which various files are only available to one OS or the other.
2. The more time you spend on a given platform, the more that platform stands to benefit from your participation in its ecosystem. If MacOS is generally a better productivity experience, stick with it, and you will be doing more to evolve that platform than you would switching to another platform regularly for a handful of tools. If Windows is a better productivity experience, don't waste your time on OSX unless you have a good reason to sit through reboots on a regular basis.
3. As a gaming platform, XP takes the cake. There are simply too many PC game-devs out there who don't take the time to learn OpenGL, and as a result the vast majority of games are difficult to properly port to non-DirectX native OSes. Your XP partition thus represents at a minimum a gaming partition. In a similar vein, maybe a video system if you can't find certain codecs for OSX. The question you should be asking yourself is: Should your XP partition be used for more than these minimum activities?
Having grown comfortable, I'm not willing to make that trade, so I continue on with a job that I don't really like all that much. You, on the other hand, do love what you do, and probably always will. That's worth a significant amount, and it's something that not everyone can have.
Comfort is also worth a significant amount, something very few can have, and by your example clearly worth more than a fulfilling career. This is the crux of the problem -- scientists and engineers in developing countries are relatively far more comfortable than their counterparts in the first world.
Yes, I do believe the metaphor Apple was striving to acheive is "the document is the application". Therefore, to edit a file, you double-click it. To quit editing it, you invoke file.quit().
It's not only a question of ethics, it's a question of security clearance, trust and responsibility. Misuse of this clearance would at the very least make finding future employment in IT nearly impossible. At worst, if you work in the medical/financial/insurance sector (heavily regulated), a publicly traded company or the public sector, such a violation might constitute felony. And your legal system probaly doesn't regard salary or morale justification for premeditated criminal acts.
When an OSS product is "bought out", it is not the community, install base, or spirit of the product that is acquired. It is the copyright and trademark that are acquired, and maybe a handful of employees, and nothing else. To retain the loyalty of the community, the interest of the install base and therefore any controlling interest in the direction of the product, the acquiring entity must govern these copyrights and trademarks wisely and above all honor the spirit of the product and its license. Otherwise the community will simply fork the product and dilute the value of the transferred IP. The only thing the community stands to lose in this situation is the right to use the prior trademark with the new fork, and perhaps a few contributors who disagree with the decision to fork.
It's only a matter of time before the Chinese government realises that free speech is no threat to a well-organized propaganda machine. The formula we've perfected in the west requires only four components:
1. Single-party rule, or dual-party rule provided there is no meaningful difference between each party. 2. Polarization of the citizenry such that members of each party are inclined to prefer gravitas-laden Spin-Alley journalism over fact-based reporting. The beauty of this is that market forces guarantee the creation of these entities at no cost to the taxpayer. 3. An efficient staff chartered with discrediting any voice that speaks out against the establishment. Again, very little money needs to be spent here -- talking points with which Spin-Alley journalists are free to clog the airwaves are simply published to the web. 4. Convenience. A comfortable citizenry is a complacent citizenry.
Item #4 will be the most difficult to implement as it requires a rich market infrastructure that China will likely not achieve for another 10 years.
.NET is well done, but its flaw is that it is Windows-centric at the moment.
And its threading implementation is at best half-baked..Net 1.1 is lacking certain fundamental threading features necessary for any application of the type the OP is designing:
No semaphores
No propagation of unhandled exceptions
The thread manager is reimplemented entirely within the CLR (no efficiencies gained or functionality inherited from the OS thread-manager)
Thread creation is very expensive, and going beyond the default thread pool limit of 25 threads is highly impractical for this reason.
There may be a number of reasons your employer is filing these patents:
A. Strategic positioning ala MAD doctrine. B. It seeks to build a revenue strem via patent-extortion ala SCO/Unisys/Forgent, etc. C. It is legitimately funding high-risk R&D projects, with the vision that these projects will have a meaningful impact on technological progress.
If A or C, several companies falling under this category have very publicly donated entire portfolios to the OSS community. With enough internal support yours may be convinced to follow a similar path.
As to whether you should quit over this, well, I would not base such a weighty decision on such a singular issue. How long have you been with this org? As a result of your tenure are you in a position to effect positive change in other areas within this org? If you are considered a valuable employee, your management would very likely be willing to respect your objection to patent work and assign you other projects -- provided of course the issue is presented in a diplomatic fashion.
I have a wife, three brothers, a sister, five sisters-in-law, three brothers-in-law, two parents, one mother-in-law, a father-in-law, one uncle, two aunts, one living grandmother, three kids (although they are all too young to use a PC), five nephews and seven nieces, so I get a lot of calls from family members asking for tech support. It's actually amazing how much their feedback has driven decisions in our security strategy.
So, if not for this guy's extended family, Windows would be a fundamentally less secure product today. I suppose it is rather amazing that the world's most powerful software company has somehow managed to extract strategically-important security feedback from three children who've never used a PC.
Slashdot Mirror
What do CPU cycles and information have in common? Both are commodities. Once a commodities market is established, production itself only represents a growth opportunity during periods of increased global demand. Innovation is a calculated risk such companies are often not willing to take when tacit collusion promises steady cash flow.
If you sense your interviewer is not already conscious of this fact, that in itself should raise a red flag. A competent manager will put her best and brightest in the interviewing chair for two reasons:
"A lot of times, you can add something graphical in two minutes and the customer might wet themselves when they see it. On the other hand, you can spend two months knocking out major requirements in back-end functionality and the customer will probably ask you why they're paying you since nothing's changed in the interface."
Amen to that brother.
I just had the same experience again the other day. The "CEO" turns to me and says, "So for tha past week you've only worked on the login page?"
I just wanted to scream him down.
As someone with merely 10 years of experience in this business, I have no symapthy. If you find yourself in this situation, it is most likely due to one or more of the following:
When you are to blame, you don't scream down anyone but yourself.
It's not so much a question of buy-off as it is an offering of free services in exchange for mindshare. Apache's strong numbers in this area lend credibility to Microsoft's competition in the server market. If Microsoft can reverse these statistics by simply giving away services for free, at best it accelerates its growth in this market at the expense of its competition, at worst it writes-off the failed campaign as a small operating loss.
Godwin's law invoked. Discussion over. You lose. Thank you, bye.
(kidding)
One giant gasp for mankind.
Unless of course you are thinking of some kind of blonde femme fatale, they are looking for DNA, not RNA. :)
There are a number of reasons this is the wrong sort of question to ask.
1. The desktop fills two mutually-exclusive roles: Productivity & Entertainment. When used as a productivity tool, you want all productivity tools within immediate reach -- you don't want 80% of your productivity tools available under one partition, with the other 20% available after a reboot. This goes for your music library as well if you like to listen to music while multitasking. As an entertainment tool, you might use your system to watch video, or play games -- both of which the typical user will do to the exclusion of productivity, so having to reboot to access 99% of one's productivity software is far less an inconvenience when this is the case. There is also the question of file access. I may be completely mistaken (as these things can change quickly), about this but last I chekced writing to an HFS partiiton from XP, or an NTFS partition from OSX are not vendor-supported activities, and you will spend time either configuring both OSes to enable this kind of file-access (possibly losing data in the process), or living in a world in which various files are only available to one OS or the other.
2. The more time you spend on a given platform, the more that platform stands to benefit from your participation in its ecosystem. If MacOS is generally a better productivity experience, stick with it, and you will be doing more to evolve that platform than you would switching to another platform regularly for a handful of tools. If Windows is a better productivity experience, don't waste your time on OSX unless you have a good reason to sit through reboots on a regular basis.
3. As a gaming platform, XP takes the cake. There are simply too many PC game-devs out there who don't take the time to learn OpenGL, and as a result the vast majority of games are difficult to properly port to non-DirectX native OSes. Your XP partition thus represents at a minimum a gaming partition. In a similar vein, maybe a video system if you can't find certain codecs for OSX. The question you should be asking yourself is: Should your XP partition be used for more than these minimum activities?
Oh, to Make/Faire Free/Libre. The joy, the responsibility, the translation.
[<3 needs to be written <3, even in Plain Old Text]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firebombing
n _World_War_II
n y
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden_i
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_bombing_on_Germa
Technically, you would type av ctrl+enter, or if you preferred the text-only advanced search interface you had to type: av.com?text=aq.
Yes, I do believe the metaphor Apple was striving to acheive is "the document is the application". Therefore, to edit a file, you double-click it. To quit editing it, you invoke file.quit().
That was my take as well.
It's not only a question of ethics, it's a question of security clearance, trust and responsibility. Misuse of this clearance would at the very least make finding future employment in IT nearly impossible. At worst, if you work in the medical/financial/insurance sector (heavily regulated), a publicly traded company or the public sector, such a violation might constitute felony. And your legal system probaly doesn't regard salary or morale justification for premeditated criminal acts.
When an OSS product is "bought out", it is not the community, install base, or spirit of the product that is acquired. It is the copyright and trademark that are acquired, and maybe a handful of employees, and nothing else. To retain the loyalty of the community, the interest of the install base and therefore any controlling interest in the direction of the product, the acquiring entity must govern these copyrights and trademarks wisely and above all honor the spirit of the product and its license. Otherwise the community will simply fork the product and dilute the value of the transferred IP. The only thing the community stands to lose in this situation is the right to use the prior trademark with the new fork, and perhaps a few contributors who disagree with the decision to fork.
Am I missing something here?
It's only a matter of time before the Chinese government realises that free speech is no threat to a well-organized propaganda machine. The formula we've perfected in the west requires only four components:
1. Single-party rule, or dual-party rule provided there is no meaningful difference between each party.
2. Polarization of the citizenry such that members of each party are inclined to prefer gravitas-laden Spin-Alley journalism over fact-based reporting. The beauty of this is that market forces guarantee the creation of these entities at no cost to the taxpayer.
3. An efficient staff chartered with discrediting any voice that speaks out against the establishment. Again, very little money needs to be spent here -- talking points with which Spin-Alley journalists are free to clog the airwaves are simply published to the web.
4. Convenience. A comfortable citizenry is a complacent citizenry.
Item #4 will be the most difficult to implement as it requires a rich market infrastructure that China will likely not achieve for another 10 years.
There may be a number of reasons your employer is filing these patents:
A. Strategic positioning ala MAD doctrine.
B. It seeks to build a revenue strem via patent-extortion ala SCO/Unisys/Forgent, etc.
C. It is legitimately funding high-risk R&D projects, with the vision that these projects will have a meaningful impact on technological progress.
If A or C, several companies falling under this category have very publicly donated entire portfolios to the OSS community. With enough internal support yours may be convinced to follow a similar path.
As to whether you should quit over this, well, I would not base such a weighty decision on such a singular issue. How long have you been with this org? As a result of your tenure are you in a position to effect positive change in other areas within this org? If you are considered a valuable employee, your management would very likely be willing to respect your objection to patent work and assign you other projects -- provided of course the issue is presented in a diplomatic fashion.
1. ... ... ...
2.
3.
4. Win FSF Award
5. Profit!!!
Unlikely.