The problem is media cards like Smart Digital, Memory Stick, etc which most camera's and PDA's use. If they can't read the file system, and Linux can't support FAT anymore, you can't transfer the cards back and forth without a Windows intermediary. There is a huge ecosystem built around FAT now, and it will be almost impossible to change to something else.
Judge Jackson was incredibly perceptive in his judgement in USDOJ vs Microsoft and it is unfortunate that the appeals court chose to ignore him. The problem with FAT is that every single flash card manufacturer implemented FAT as the file system for their cards. They didn't chose it on techincal merit, FAT doesn't have any technical merit. The only reason it was chosen war that FAT is the only file system that is guaranteed to be present in every Microsoft OS. If these patents are allowed to stand, you can forget about taking pictures with your spiffy new 8Mpixel camera and mounting the pictures in your Linux box and you can forget about mounting it as a USB drive too. Unless your camera vendor provides ext2 or some Linux software to read it (fat chance), you are going to have to own a Windows box to get your pictures transfered. The card manufacturers could have come up with their own file system optimized for flash, or use one that was unencumbered like the Berkeley Fast File system, but unless Microsoft bundled support for it, it would be totally pointless, and Microsoft would be just as willing to do that as they are to implement OpenDocument. This is exactly the kind of innovation that never occurred simply because it wasn't in Microsoft's best interest to allow it to occur, and they are going to continue to fight tooth and nail to make sure it doesn't now.
Which is unfortunate, because at times it seems that Paul Murphy has finally caught a glimmer of a clue, but it keeps dancing away just out of his reach. FWIW, the GPL only gets a minor mention, and Murphy seems to recognize that to the extent that Linux growth has slowed, it is primarily due to FUD over imagined legal issues, not over any actual legal issues. In addition, the adoption rate of Linux will naturally slwo just because the more of the market you have, the harder it is to grow.
I'd love to see Jobs tell the RIAA members to go screw themselves and open up iTunes as a 'label' for independent artists most of whom would probably be happy to take a much smaller cut then the leaches at the labels do. Talented muscians don't need multi-million dollar marketing campaigns to be successful, they just need an audience. And iTunes could deliver that audience much more efficiently than Warner or Sony/Columbia ever could.
Re:Integration versus Bundling, Choice
on
Pepping Up Windows
·
· Score: 2
I'd mod this up if I had points. butI'm fresh out today. And it's worth pointing out that Microsoft only bundles half way decent apps when they wish to use their platform monopoly to extinsguish some competitor that might someday threaten that monopoly. MS bundled IE because they didn't want Netscape to become the development platform rendering Windows irrelevant. The bundled a broken Java for the same reason. They bundle a media player for a similar reason. If the product doesn't threaten the Windows monopoly, or even better, helps extend it by offering a solution that doesn't run on anything else, MS is perfectly happy to ship nothing, or total crap in that space.
According to Symantec, this is an enormous untapped market for them since we are all very attractive targets and living in a security dream world. And those products, particularly for Linux, are where exactly? Actions speak louder than words, and if Symantec really thought there was an enormous threat here, they would be pushing out products to address it, because that is what companies that want to maximize profit do. Instead, of products, they produce press releases. Once Microsoft's lapdog, always Microsoft's lapdog I guess, even after they have decided to have you put down.
[ a document format based around it, and printer output that is an exact correlation. (A system years ahead of what even OSX and Abode.) (And don't even try to compare PDF/Postscript or tell me that Apple had color matching years ago.]
I won't tell you that Adobe and Apple did it years ago, but Sun did with their NeWS window system back in, lets see,... 1987? almost 20 years ago. It bombed, but not for technical reasons (other than the performance of hardware at the time). It is nice to see the idea is coming back, but it is hardly an innovation. And Sun's version ran over the network too.
Anybody that thinks you can 'get rich' on basic science grants that doesn't advance the agenda of some corporate sponser is on crack. It would be nice, but it just doesn't work that way. Basic science researchers compete with each other for the crumbs that fall of the table.
As soon as Photoshop runs on Linux it might be useful to me, but I'm in the bottom dwelling 50%, not a professional, so it could well be that Adobe is right and it just isn't worth the effort to port.
[My hope is that the next President who shows up doesn't dive in and try to change everything.]
My hope is the next President jumps in and compares the cost/benefit ratio of putting a couple of people on the moon for a few days with the cost/benefit ration of every other science project, including unmanned exploration, and the cost/benefit ratio of every other activity that the government could be involved in, and then selects the projects with the greatest cost/benefit. Putting men on the moon or Mars as a personal vanity project or to show that one can do 'the vision thing' probably isn't anywhere close to the top of the list. For example, for 100B, you could give 833,000 kids a free ride through the most expensive Universities in the country. For $100B, you could replace 5 million government vehicles with hybrids and save 500 million gallons of gas. Or reduce the Social Security deficit. Or return it to the taxpayers. Or fund 20+ Cassini-Huygens or Mars rover type missions. Bush has done a reasonable job of getting us back on track to the moon, but of all the possible challenges to the nation, is that the one that most deserves 100B of our money? I don't think so.
I more or less agree with this, though I don't have most of these issues with Fedora Core, so it is certainly possible to resolve the packaging issue. Actually, I'm a little bummed that Fedora Core 4 dropped gnumeric from the default install set since I prefer it to OpenOffice Calc.
The Media Player issue is a real sore spot for all Linux distro's though, and it extends to encoders as well. I recently did some video capture with Kino from a Sony digital-8 capture. The capture worked like a champ, but then I wanted to transcode drom DV to Mpeg-2; Uh-oh, no can do. After a fruitless afternoon searching for an appropriate GPL codec, I gave up and booted Windows. And I never could get the Cisco vpn_client to compile with Fedora Core 4 running in 64 bit mode, so it was back to fedora Core 3/32bit. And, of course, I needed to install the NVidia graphics drivers to get decent 3d + dual head.
The patent issue just isn't going away anytime soon, and neither is the closed source driver issue. And those two things more than anything else are going to keep Linux from every being a mainstream desktop, at least in the US.
Agree completely. There was never anything wrong with Solaris to begin with except for the overpriced, underperforming SPARC hardware that it ran on. Once the full Galaxy line is flushed out, and the huge Sun ISV catalog is ported to Solaris/x86-64, it is going to be much harder to make a case for running Linux in the server room. Sun has a pretty compelling business case; you can buy a Solaris/x86-64 box from us, have the OS preinstalled, and have both the hardware and software fully supported by us. Or you can buy a box from Dell, and OS from RedHat, and have them point fingers at each other when something goes wrong. It may not even be true, but it should sound pretty good to IT managers that have better things to do than install operating systems. Because at the end of the day, they want to run their business, not computer systems.
>>
What do you know about ROCK that we don't? Englighten us.
All I know is what I read in the papers, and what Sun has been saying is '30x USIIIi @ 1.2HZ' shipping in 2008 at the earliest. By 2008, that kind of performance isn't going to be very impressive as we will probably see 4 core, 65nm X86-64 chips from both AMD and Intel by then.
And hopefully the Galaxy boxes are the first step. I'd really like to see an UltraSPARC IVi chip in a Socket 940 package with hypertransport that would just drop into the Galaxy servers. That would indicate to me that Sun has finally climbed back on the clue train. Other than potentially being a vehicle for generating patents, Niagara and Rock don't look all that interesting to me. If we charitably assume that Niagara actually has specrate numbers that are 8 times as fast as the UltraSPARC IIIi, that only puts them in the same ballpark as a dual Opteron 275, and the Opteron boxes are shipping now.
On reading the article, just more bad reporting most likely orginating in the Microsoft PR department. On reading the article, there isn't a single reference to an actual Mac virus. Instead, everybody quoted points to a single piece of malware that might cause a problem, but doesn't appear to be an actual problem. Of course, Linux users are also misguided in thinking that they are in better shape than Windows users. In fact, according to the article, Microsoft is now way out in front of everybody on security except the traditional Unix vendors. Apparently MaxOS X and Linux don't count as Unix.
The bottom line is that while everybody needs to implement good security practices, the reality is that the only system that had, and continues to have huge security problems that can be automatically exploited is Windows.
My experience is similar to yours except that I've found that Windows is a royal PITA as both a server and a workstation OS. I'm continually amazed that people pay Microsoft for Windows instead of the other way around.
Java runs on Solaris/SPARC, Solaris/X86, Windows, MacOS, and Linux. As soon as Microsoft starts supplying.NET for those platforms, on similar terms to what Sun offers, then I'll consider using it. In addition, a GPL compatible RFND patent license for every 'invention' required to implement.NET and the framework would give them a step up on Java. Until then, I'll pass, thanks anyway.
Amen, brother. I wonder when it beame evil to pay talented people what they were worth, but I guess it must be an afront to folks like Jonathan Schwartz that get paid to continually screw up and write moronic stuff on their blog.
AMD would still win on price/performance as Itanium chips are much more expensive and the volumes are so low that the supporting chipsets and motherboards are more expensive. Itanium would lose on performance/watt too which Intel just yesterday decided was an important metric.
On rereading my post, I don't notice anywhere that I stated that all operating systems were 'perfect' w/r/t to security, just as no car model is completely immune from the possibility of bursting into flames. What I was suggesting is that Microsoft spends significant amounts of money trying to persuade users that the degree of security problems that are present in Windows that can be automatically exploited is 'normal'. It is not. None of MacOS, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, Linux, Solaris, AIX, HP_UX, IRIX, Unixware, etc. have perfect security, however, they all have orders of magnitude better track records than Windows with regard to remote exploits.
This is part of the first wave of "it's not so bad and it is the victim's fauly anyway" press releases which will be followed shortly with the 'any operating system is vulnerable to viruses' wave of press releases, followed by the 'Windows Vista is much more secure and everybody should upgrade' press releases. The only amazing part is that Windows users never seem to catch on. Somebody who bought three Ford Pintos and somehow manage to survive when they all burst into flames would probably think long and hard before buying a fourth one. Windows users? Not a chance.
She isn't pro-Microsoft, she is paid by Microsoft indirectly through the Yankee group to present a pro Microsoft slant as if it were independant analysis. That is her job. If the current article appears more 'balanced' it is because even a complete idiot can tell by now that Linux offers orders of magnitude lower TCO than Windows. Just yesterday I was pricing a new computer for a small business that I am an investor in. Unfortunately, they already have an unquenchable 'Microsoft Jones' which means that they will pay almost twice as much for that computer as they would for a Fedora/OpenOFfice solution, and for them, it would work just as well.
and maybe, just maybe, they got from 50% of the market to 90% of the market by offering a 'bundled with new computer' price that their competitors couldn't match because they didn't have an illegal OS monopoly. For the most part, Microsoft Office got to be the most popular office suite the old fashion way; by repeated and continual violations of the law until there wasn't a viable competitor left that could force interoperability.
>>It's also really small when done correctly...we run ours off of a 32meg thumbdrive.
This isn't especially small in the embedded space. I used uCLinux on a Motorola Dragnoball a few years ago, and the entire system ran quite well on a uCSimm with 8 MB of dynamic memory and 8MB of flash including ethernet and tcp/ip. Things like QNX and Windriver can be tailored to run in even less space. Of course, it depends on the hardware architecture you are running on, and especially on what you are trying to do.
Sure, occasionally they break a few kneecaps, and torch a few buildings, but most of them are probably real good to their faimlies, and to winows and orphans, even the ones that they helped create. Your honest, local, neighborhood business man is highly over rated anyway, and mostly exists to spite the mega corporations.
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The problem is media cards like Smart Digital, Memory Stick, etc which most camera's and PDA's use. If they can't read the file system, and Linux can't support FAT anymore, you can't transfer the cards back and forth without a Windows intermediary. There is a huge ecosystem built around FAT now, and it will be almost impossible to change to something else.
Judge Jackson was incredibly perceptive in his judgement in USDOJ vs Microsoft and it is unfortunate that the appeals court chose to ignore him. The problem with FAT is that every single flash card manufacturer implemented FAT as the file system for their cards. They didn't chose it on techincal merit, FAT doesn't have any technical merit. The only reason it was chosen war that FAT is the only file system that is guaranteed to be present in every Microsoft OS. If these patents are allowed to stand, you can forget about taking pictures with your spiffy new 8Mpixel camera and mounting the pictures in your Linux box and you can forget about mounting it as a USB drive too. Unless your camera vendor provides ext2 or some Linux software to read it (fat chance), you are going to have to own a Windows box to get your pictures transfered. The card manufacturers could have come up with their own file system optimized for flash, or use one that was unencumbered like the Berkeley Fast File system, but unless Microsoft bundled support for it, it would be totally pointless, and Microsoft would be just as willing to do that as they are to implement OpenDocument. This is exactly the kind of innovation that never occurred simply because it wasn't in Microsoft's best interest to allow it to occur, and they are going to continue to fight tooth and nail to make sure it doesn't now.
Which is unfortunate, because at times it seems that Paul Murphy has finally caught a glimmer of a clue, but it keeps dancing away just out of his reach. FWIW, the GPL only gets a minor mention, and Murphy seems to recognize that to the extent that Linux growth has slowed, it is primarily due to FUD over imagined legal issues, not over any actual legal issues. In addition, the adoption rate of Linux will naturally slwo just because the more of the market you have, the harder it is to grow.
I'd love to see Jobs tell the RIAA members to go screw themselves and open up iTunes as a 'label' for independent artists most of whom would probably be happy to take a much smaller cut then the leaches at the labels do. Talented muscians don't need multi-million dollar marketing campaigns to be successful, they just need an audience. And iTunes could deliver that audience much more efficiently than Warner or Sony/Columbia ever could.
I'd mod this up if I had points. butI'm fresh out today. And it's worth pointing out that Microsoft only bundles half way decent apps when they wish to use their platform monopoly to extinsguish some competitor that might someday threaten that monopoly. MS bundled IE because they didn't want Netscape to become the development platform rendering Windows irrelevant. The bundled a broken Java for the same reason. They bundle a media player for a similar reason. If the product doesn't threaten the Windows monopoly, or even better, helps extend it by offering a solution that doesn't run on anything else, MS is perfectly happy to ship nothing, or total crap in that space.
According to Symantec, this is an enormous untapped market for them since we are all very attractive targets and living in a security dream world. And those products, particularly for Linux, are where exactly? Actions speak louder than words, and if Symantec really thought there was an enormous threat here, they would be pushing out products to address it, because that is what companies that want to maximize profit do. Instead, of products, they produce press releases. Once Microsoft's lapdog, always Microsoft's lapdog I guess, even after they have decided to have you put down.
[ a document format based around it, and printer output that is an exact correlation. (A system years ahead of what even OSX and Abode.) (And don't even try to compare PDF/Postscript or tell me that Apple had color matching years ago.]
... 1987? almost 20 years ago. It bombed, but not for technical reasons (other than the performance of hardware at the time). It is nice to see the idea is coming back, but it is hardly an innovation. And Sun's version ran over the network too.
I won't tell you that Adobe and Apple did it years ago, but Sun did with their NeWS window system back in, lets see,
Anybody that thinks you can 'get rich' on basic science grants that doesn't advance the agenda of some corporate sponser is on crack. It would be nice, but it just doesn't work that way. Basic science researchers compete with each other for the crumbs that fall of the table.
As soon as Photoshop runs on Linux it might be useful to me, but I'm in the bottom dwelling 50%, not a professional, so it could well be that Adobe is right and it just isn't worth the effort to port.
[My hope is that the next President who shows up doesn't dive in and try to change everything.]
My hope is the next President jumps in and compares the cost/benefit ratio of putting a couple of people on the moon for a few days with the cost/benefit ration of every other science project, including unmanned exploration, and the cost/benefit ratio of every other activity that the government could be involved in, and then selects the projects with the greatest cost/benefit. Putting men on the moon or Mars as a personal vanity project or to show that one can do 'the vision thing' probably isn't anywhere close to the top of the list. For example, for 100B, you could give 833,000 kids a free ride through the most expensive Universities in the country. For $100B, you could replace 5 million government vehicles with hybrids and save 500 million gallons of gas. Or reduce the Social Security deficit. Or return it to the taxpayers. Or fund 20+ Cassini-Huygens or Mars rover type missions. Bush has done a reasonable job of getting us back on track to the moon, but of all the possible challenges to the nation, is that the one that most deserves 100B of our money? I don't think so.
I more or less agree with this, though I don't have most of these issues with Fedora Core, so it is certainly possible to resolve the packaging issue. Actually, I'm a little bummed that Fedora Core 4 dropped gnumeric from the default install set since I prefer it to OpenOffice Calc.
The Media Player issue is a real sore spot for all Linux distro's though, and it extends to encoders as well. I recently did some video capture with Kino from a Sony digital-8 capture. The capture worked like a champ, but then I wanted to transcode drom DV to Mpeg-2; Uh-oh, no can do. After a fruitless afternoon searching for an appropriate GPL codec, I gave up and booted Windows. And I never could get the Cisco vpn_client to compile with Fedora Core 4 running in 64 bit mode, so it was back to fedora Core 3/32bit. And, of course, I needed to install the NVidia graphics drivers to get decent 3d + dual head.
The patent issue just isn't going away anytime soon, and neither is the closed source driver issue. And those two things more than anything else are going to keep Linux from every being a mainstream desktop, at least in the US.
Agree completely. There was never anything wrong with Solaris to begin with except for the overpriced, underperforming SPARC hardware that it ran on. Once the full Galaxy line is flushed out, and the huge Sun ISV catalog is ported to Solaris/x86-64, it is going to be much harder to make a case for running Linux in the server room. Sun has a pretty compelling business case; you can buy a Solaris/x86-64 box from us, have the OS preinstalled, and have both the hardware and software fully supported by us. Or you can buy a box from Dell, and OS from RedHat, and have them point fingers at each other when something goes wrong. It may not even be true, but it should sound pretty good to IT managers that have better things to do than install operating systems. Because at the end of the day, they want to run their business, not computer systems.
>> What do you know about ROCK that we don't? Englighten us.
All I know is what I read in the papers, and what Sun has been saying is '30x USIIIi @ 1.2HZ' shipping in 2008 at the earliest. By 2008, that kind of performance isn't going to be very impressive as we will probably see 4 core, 65nm X86-64 chips from both AMD and Intel by then.
And hopefully the Galaxy boxes are the first step. I'd really like to see an UltraSPARC IVi chip in a Socket 940 package with hypertransport that would just drop into the Galaxy servers. That would indicate to me that Sun has finally climbed back on the clue train. Other than potentially being a vehicle for generating patents, Niagara and Rock don't look all that interesting to me. If we charitably assume that Niagara actually has specrate numbers that are 8 times as fast as the UltraSPARC IIIi, that only puts them in the same ballpark as a dual Opteron 275, and the Opteron boxes are shipping now.
On reading the article, just more bad reporting most likely orginating in the Microsoft PR department. On reading the article, there isn't a single reference to an actual Mac virus. Instead, everybody quoted points to a single piece of malware that might cause a problem, but doesn't appear to be an actual problem. Of course, Linux users are also misguided in thinking that they are in better shape than Windows users. In fact, according to the article, Microsoft is now way out in front of everybody on security except the traditional Unix vendors. Apparently MaxOS X and Linux don't count as Unix.
The bottom line is that while everybody needs to implement good security practices, the reality is that the only system that had, and continues to have huge security problems that can be automatically exploited is Windows.
My experience is similar to yours except that I've found that Windows is a royal PITA as both a server and a workstation OS. I'm continually amazed that people pay Microsoft for Windows instead of the other way around.
Java runs on Solaris/SPARC, Solaris/X86, Windows, MacOS, and Linux. As soon as Microsoft starts supplying .NET for those platforms, on similar terms to what Sun offers, then I'll consider using it. In addition, a GPL compatible RFND patent license for every 'invention' required to implement .NET and the framework would give them a step up on Java. Until then, I'll pass, thanks anyway.
Amen, brother. I wonder when it beame evil to pay talented people what they were worth, but I guess it must be an afront to folks like Jonathan Schwartz that get paid to continually screw up and write moronic stuff on their blog.
AMD would still win on price/performance as Itanium chips are much more expensive and the volumes are so low that the supporting chipsets and motherboards are more expensive. Itanium would lose on performance/watt too which Intel just yesterday decided was an important metric.
On rereading my post, I don't notice anywhere that I stated that all operating systems were 'perfect' w/r/t to security, just as no car model is completely immune from the possibility of bursting into flames. What I was suggesting is that Microsoft spends significant amounts of money trying to persuade users that the degree of security problems that are present in Windows that can be automatically exploited is 'normal'. It is not. None of MacOS, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, Linux, Solaris, AIX, HP_UX, IRIX, Unixware, etc. have perfect security, however, they all have orders of magnitude better track records than Windows with regard to remote exploits.
This is part of the first wave of "it's not so bad and it is the victim's fauly anyway" press releases which will be followed shortly with the 'any operating system is vulnerable to viruses' wave of press releases, followed by the 'Windows Vista is much more secure and everybody should upgrade' press releases. The only amazing part is that Windows users never seem to catch on. Somebody who bought three Ford Pintos and somehow manage to survive when they all burst into flames would probably think long and hard before buying a fourth one. Windows users? Not a chance.
She isn't pro-Microsoft, she is paid by Microsoft indirectly through the Yankee group to present a pro Microsoft slant as if it were independant analysis. That is her job. If the current article appears more 'balanced' it is because even a complete idiot can tell by now that Linux offers orders of magnitude lower TCO than Windows. Just yesterday I was pricing a new computer for a small business that I am an investor in. Unfortunately, they already have an unquenchable 'Microsoft Jones' which means that they will pay almost twice as much for that computer as they would for a Fedora/OpenOFfice solution, and for them, it would work just as well.
and maybe, just maybe, they got from 50% of the market to 90% of the market by offering a 'bundled with new computer' price that their competitors couldn't match because they didn't have an illegal OS monopoly. For the most part, Microsoft Office got to be the most popular office suite the old fashion way; by repeated and continual violations of the law until there wasn't a viable competitor left that could force interoperability.
>>It's also really small when done correctly...we run ours off of a 32meg thumbdrive. This isn't especially small in the embedded space. I used uCLinux on a Motorola Dragnoball a few years ago, and the entire system ran quite well on a uCSimm with 8 MB of dynamic memory and 8MB of flash including ethernet and tcp/ip. Things like QNX and Windriver can be tailored to run in even less space. Of course, it depends on the hardware architecture you are running on, and especially on what you are trying to do.
Sure, occasionally they break a few kneecaps, and torch a few buildings, but most of them are probably real good to their faimlies, and to winows and orphans, even the ones that they helped create. Your honest, local, neighborhood business man is highly over rated anyway, and mostly exists to spite the mega corporations.