Selling iceboxes to eskimos is easy if you know anything about marketing. It's all in the positioning. Instead of iceboxes, you have to call them "bear-proof meat lockers".
Lack of an integrated software environment- What is that supposed to mean? Does it mean that I can choose what stuff I want to use?
My dictionary defines the word "integrated" as "formed or blended into a whole"...the word "choose" does not appear anywhere.
With MS, there's one choice. With linux, there's multiple choices for software to use.
Actually, I have found multiple choices of software to use on MS as well.
I don't quite get what they're saying with this one. If someone knows, then I'd like to understand better.
See above.
Lack of a clear roadmap- Well, the idea with linux is to make it more stable, faster, and more secure (not necessarily in that order). What more of a 'product map' do you want?
Perhaps some more details on exactly how it will become "more stable, faster, and more secure", and perhaps a rough idea about when it will be available. Some predictability of the timetable would be nice too, even +/-2 years (not "it will be ready when it's ready...now stop asking")
MS isn't going to come up with the next killer app of the internet.
Well, they have an awfully big R&D budget, so I actually think the chances are reasonable.
All of the other big applications have come out of open-source groups.
Accountability if problems arise- This means that the top IT person wants some one else to take the blame if something bad happens. Everyone knows MS stuff doesn't work perfectly, so if it screws up, it's not the admin's fault. With linux, if it screws up, most people (correctly) blame the admin.
And your point is?
I bet a lot of problems come up becaue when a company switches from windows to linux, the admins expect it to work the same, which couldn't be farther from the truth. Linux uses different programs, and often times, the best way to configure it is vi and a man page or two. With windows, it's all point-and-click.
But everyone is telling me that Linux is just like Windows, but it's totally free and never gets any viruses. Shouldn't I dump all my Windows stuff?
I fail to see why anyone would register through Verisign when you have places like GoDaddy that will give you a domain for less than $20 for two years.
Well, I used one of those discount registrars for a group of addresses, and I deeply regretted the decision. It turns out the outfit split their service delivery between two separate companies, with two separate web front-ends, separate user IDs, and passwords etc. (which weren't even provided to me when I signed up). Worse, the group doing technical support was overseas, so the responsiveness wasn't great. Then, "whois" never worked on the domain name, just kept timing out. When I complained to technical support, they just kind of mumbled something like "that shouldn't be happening, hmmmm...."
I ultimately dropped them, and moved all of my business to Network Solutions. Sure, it cost me a little more, but I find their web-based management tool to be very usable, and have no complaints about their responsiveness.
Everytime I think about possible applications for the Simputer, I am reminded of this press release issued a few years ago:
The Global Village
KABINDA, ZAIRE--In a move IBM offices are hailing as a major step in the company's ongoing worldwide telecommunications revolution, M'wana Ndeti, a member of Zaire's Bantu tribe, used an IBM global uplink network modem yesterday to crush a nut.
Ndeti, who spent 20 minutes trying to open the nut by hand, easily cracked it open by smashing it repeatedly with the powerful modem.
"I could not crush the nut by myself," said the 47-year-old Ndeti, who added the savory nut to a thick, peanut-based soup minutes later. "With IBM's help, I was able to break it." Ndeti discovered the nut-breaking, 28.8 V.34 modem yesterday, when IBM was shooting a commercial in his southwestern Zaire village. During a break in shooting, which shows African villagers eagerly teleconferencing via computer with Japanese schoolchildren, Ndeti snuck onto the set and took the modem, which he believed would serve well as a "smashing" utensil.
IBM officials were not surprised the longtime computer giant was able to provide Ndeti with practical solutions to his everyday problems. "Our telecommunications systems offer people all over the world global networking solutions that fit their specific needs," said Herbert Ross, IBM's director of marketing. "Whether you're a nun cloistered in an Italian abbey or an Aborigine in Australia's Great Sandy Desert, IBM has the ideas to get you where you want to go today."
According to Ndeti, of the modem's many powerful features, most impressive was its hard plastic casing, which easily sustained several minutes of vigorous pounding against a large stone. "I put the nut on a rock, and I hit it with the modem," Ndeti said. "The modem did not break. It is a good modem."
Ndeti was so impressed with the modem that he purchased a new, state-of- the-art IBM workstation, complete with a PowerPC 601 microprocessor, a quad-speed internal CD-ROM drive and three 16-bit ethernet networking connectors. The tribesman has already made good use of the computer system, fashioning a gazelle trap out of its wires, a boat anchor out of the monitor and a crude but effective weapon from its mouse.
"This is a good computer," said Ndeti, carving up a just-captured gazelle with the computer's flat, sharp internal processing device. "I am using every part of it. I will cook this gazelle on the keyboard." Hours later, Ndeti capped off his delicious gazelle dinner by smoking the computer's 200-page owner's manual.
IBM spokespeople praised Ndeti's choice of computers. "We are pleased that the Bantu people are turning to IBM for their business needs," said company CEO William Allaire. "From Kansas City to Kinshasa, IBM is bringing the world closer together. Our cutting-edge technology is truly creating a global village."
I don't know, but the bottled water industry seems to be doing pretty well...
Every time this analogy comes up, I am astonished at its ignorance. If you think that software is as easy to produce as water, you have clearly never written a line of code yourself.
It is certainly true that IBM is fully behind Linux, but that has little to do with any commitment to Open Source!
When is IBM going to release the code to its most strategic software products, such as WebSphere, DB2, or zOS? When hell freezes over, that's when! According to Software Magazine, IBM makes more than $40 billion from its closed-source software right now. Do you think it is going to throw all of that licensing revenue away just to eke out a few more dollars from service or hardware opportunities? No way! IBM's software packages are highly leveraged cash cows, and all of the "street cred" with the hacker community in the world wouldn't justify sacrificing them. Everyone talks about the $1B that IBM is spending on Linux, but you don't hear as much about the $1B that it is spending on WebSphere, which it develops and releases the old-fashioned way -- with proprietary code and very high-margin licensing fees.
Make no mistake, IBM believes in the traditional software business just as much as Microsoft or Oracle. Its embrace of Linux as an operating system is simply a tactical manuver to gain leverage in adjacent software, service, and hardware markets.
Several years ago, a ham radio operator told me that some russian cosmonauts bounced off the earth's atmosphere in the late 1960's. Apparently, they tried to reenter at just the wrong angle and "skidded" off the atmosphere into deep space without any way of returning. According to the source, ham operators worldwide were able to eavesdrop on the related radio activity (which was the only way the story got out, since the Soviet government at that time still kept secret all news topics that couldn't be reported with a positive spin).
Recently, a sceptical colleague objected that this was impossible due to the laws of physics. The objector claimed that the craft would have slowed under any circustances because of its momentum and effects of the atmosphere, even if it meant burning up. However, he related a story he had heard much earlier (early 1960's?) in which AM radios, if tuned to a certain channel, could pick up a fading signal of the heartbeat of a marooned astronaut. Yet another acquaintance claimed that is was actually the first female cosmonaut who had been marooned.
Has any one else heard any more variations of this story? Is this just a reoccuring ham radio "fish story", or is there some factual basis? Also, would an object leaving orbit like that eventually return, even years later?
Has Gnutella source code been released yet?
on
Gnutella at One Year
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· Score: 1
The last time I checked, the Gnutella development team was waiting until to release its source code until "Version 1.0" was ready. I know that the protocol spec is open, and that a number of clones are available that work just fine, but I always thought it was odd that the original did not actually appear to be Open Source. Are there any restrictions on using the term "Gnu" in a product name without making the source available?
If Microsoft or some other company wanted to make their own distribution, or fork the kernel their own way, they are certainly free to do so
Except they couldn't call it "Linux", because Linus holds the trademark to the Linux name, and he can license it as he pleases. If Linus doesn't like where the forked product is going, he can withhold the right to call it Linux, which would dramatically restrict the forked product's market potential.
This appears similar to the way Sun controls Java. The Java language is based an "open" specification, meaning that anyone can create their own implementation of the APIs that Sun publishes. However, to actually call the implementation "Java" (which Sun has trademarked), the implementation must pass Sun's "conformance tests", which it controls alone.
Yep, while this may seem like just one of many recent announcements of clustering products for Linux, LifeKeeper is a little different because it is based on proven high-availability (HA) technology that many Fortune 500 companies, including Chase Manhattan Bank and AT&T, use on a day-to-day basis to insure that business-critical applications keep running under any circumstances. LifeKeeper was originally developed by NCR for its MP-RAS UNIX, where it competed head-to-head with UNIX-based HA clustering products from heavy-weights such as IBM and HP. NCR later ported LifeKeeper to Windows NT and Solaris, and when the company got out of the general systems business to focus on the retail market, it sold the technology off to Steeleye, a start-up founded by a group of industry veterans which is now doing the port to Linux. Steeleye's functional overview of LifeKeeper for Linux is here, and NCR still maintains detailed documentation for LifeKeeper here.
The availability of LifeKeeper directly from Compaq is a big step forward for the deployment of Linux systems in enterprise environments because HA clusters need to be tested and supported on a system basis, i.e. HW and SW together.
To see how this works, check out IBM AS/400
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MySQL FS
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· Score: 3
The AS/400 uses a relational database as a universal data store for all system, application, and user data resources. The database is protected with very fine-grained access privileges and managed with well-defined administrative tools, which dramatically boosts security (since there is only one global security mechanism to manage all system and application resources).
This approach also simplifies development, which helps to make the AS/400 such a powerful application engine.
Mainframes implement some of the most proven security mechanisms in the industry, and have rightfully gained a reputation for providing exceptionally secure environments. Still, even though most high-profile security breaches seem to occur on Windows or UNIX systems, mainframes can be hacked as well if all the "back doors" aren't secured. A two-part session at this summer's SHARE conference reviewed procedures for protecting IBM S/390 mainframes from break-ins. Here are links to the.PDF files of the presentations used for Part 1 and Part 2 of the session.
TurboLinux Cluster Server provides High Availability functions that boosts uptime for services such as Web serving, mail hosting, news, and FTP. TurboLinux also has a high-performance clustering product called EnFuzion.
Red Hat provides a package called High Availability Server that includes load balancing, fault tolerance, and improved scalability for IP-based applications.
However, taking into account Ahmdahl coefficients (how efficiently a multi-processor or multi-computer parallelises for a particular problem), and the fact that inter-computer connections would be both slow _and_ very high latency....
The applications that are deployed on these types of systems are "embarassingly parallel", i.e. specifically designed to be largely independent of inter-process synchronization, which makes them immune to Amdahl's law. This is what allows these types of supercomputers to be implemented by lashing hundreds or thousands of processors together. In theory, the number of processors is limited only by a) cost, and b) management tools that allow the systems to be operated by rational means.
When you buy software, you are actually purchasing a license to use to the software, and vendors routinely insert clauses in their license agreements that help them meet their goals in the marketplace.
For example, Netscape prohibits publishing benchmarks in the license agreement for its Client software. The games developer Apogee (a.k.a. 3DRealms) even added a clause to its license agreement earlier this year that prevented negative reviews of its product! So Microsoft is really not acting unusually harsh in this regard.
Some of the commercially-developed UNIX systems have successfully used this feature to handle enterprise workloads. For example, HP-UX has long derived a unique advantage from its Dynamic Memory Resilience feature, which allows a server to sustain single-bit errors (see HP-UX 11i specs). If the Linux implementation of this function can also be made to work dynamically, i.e. fence off memory that goes bad during runtime, it will be a huge step forward for establishing Linux as a true enterprise alternative.
NDS would be a useless wart on the rump of Linux. It's for managing large numbers of file and print servers, not internet/intranet servers like Linux. Linux already has vastly superior internet directory capabilities.
Just out of curiosity, does anyone know what he is referring to here?
There have been several stories about about this during the past few weeks, but none seem to mention which OS will be used. Will it be Linux? After all, Crusoe does not yet run anything else, does it?
That's right, a realistic positioning of Linux would be far more useful, even if it has to point out some of Linux's shortcomings to help IT managers plan its proper deployment.
Publius, Freenet, Napster, and Gnutella all simply represent the next step in the development of full-fledged system software for the Internet. The Web browser effectively provided a global, read-only file system for the Internet, and these engines are attempts to standardize the method used to locate content on that file system independently of any single search site such as Yahoo or Google.
Piracy is only the killer app that is driving these technologies into the mainstream. Their real value will emerge when developers start to code next-generation applications that are built on them from the ground up for a variety of new applications, yet unimagined. All of this is part of a pendulum-swing away from the centralized, server-centric computing that has been in fashion for the past few years, and back towards client-oriented, peer-to-peer applications that take full advantage of desktop hardware.
every time I run across something completely inexplicable (to me, anyway) it's always nice to eventually discovered exactly why its implementation was so inscrutable
Well, except some decisions appear to have been made near-randomly. For example, I recall an interview with Ken Thompson a few years back in which he was asked what he would have done differently if he could design UNIX all over again. His answer? He would have put an "e" at the end of creat().
Slashdot Mirror
Union Square in New York City
Selling iceboxes to eskimos is easy if you know anything about marketing. It's all in the positioning. Instead of iceboxes, you have to call them "bear-proof meat lockers".
Lack of an integrated software environment- What is that supposed to mean? Does it mean that I can choose what stuff I want to use?
My dictionary defines the word "integrated" as "formed or blended into a whole"...the word "choose" does not appear anywhere.
With MS, there's one choice. With linux, there's multiple choices for software to use.
Actually, I have found multiple choices of software to use on MS as well.
I don't quite get what they're saying with this one. If someone knows, then I'd like to understand better.
See above.
Lack of a clear roadmap- Well, the idea with linux is to make it more stable, faster, and more secure (not necessarily in that order). What more of a 'product map' do you want?
Perhaps some more details on exactly how it will become "more stable, faster, and more secure", and perhaps a rough idea about when it will be available. Some predictability of the timetable would be nice too, even +/-2 years (not "it will be ready when it's ready...now stop asking")
MS isn't going to come up with the next killer app of the internet.
Well, they have an awfully big R&D budget, so I actually think the chances are reasonable.
All of the other big applications have come out of open-source groups.
Accountability if problems arise- This means that the top IT person wants some one else to take the blame if something bad happens. Everyone knows MS stuff doesn't work perfectly, so if it screws up, it's not the admin's fault. With linux, if it screws up, most people (correctly) blame the admin.
And your point is?
I bet a lot of problems come up becaue when a company switches from windows to linux, the admins expect it to work the same, which couldn't be farther from the truth. Linux uses different programs, and often times, the best way to configure it is vi and a man page or two. With windows, it's all point-and-click.
But everyone is telling me that Linux is just like Windows, but it's totally free and never gets any viruses. Shouldn't I dump all my Windows stuff?
I fail to see why anyone would register through Verisign when you have places like GoDaddy that will give you a domain for less than $20 for two years.
Well, I used one of those discount registrars for a group of addresses, and I deeply regretted the decision. It turns out the outfit split their service delivery between two separate companies, with two separate web front-ends, separate user IDs, and passwords etc. (which weren't even provided to me when I signed up). Worse, the group doing technical support was overseas, so the responsiveness wasn't great. Then, "whois" never worked on the domain name, just kept timing out. When I complained to technical support, they just kind of mumbled something like "that shouldn't be happening, hmmmm...."
I ultimately dropped them, and moved all of my business to Network Solutions. Sure, it cost me a little more, but I find their web-based management tool to be very usable, and have no complaints about their responsiveness.
Wer sagt dass der alte Ludwig nicht im voraus wusste wofur seine Landesmanner fahig seien wurden?
Everytime I think about possible applications for the Simputer, I am reminded of this press release issued a few years ago:
The Global Village
KABINDA, ZAIRE--In a move IBM offices are hailing as a major step in the company's ongoing worldwide telecommunications revolution, M'wana Ndeti, a member of Zaire's Bantu tribe, used an IBM global uplink network modem yesterday to crush a nut.
Ndeti, who spent 20 minutes trying to open the nut by hand, easily cracked it open by smashing it repeatedly with the powerful modem.
"I could not crush the nut by myself," said the 47-year-old Ndeti, who added the savory nut to a thick, peanut-based soup minutes later. "With IBM's help, I was able to break it." Ndeti discovered the nut-breaking, 28.8 V.34 modem yesterday, when IBM was shooting a commercial in his southwestern Zaire village. During a break in shooting, which shows African villagers eagerly teleconferencing via computer with Japanese schoolchildren, Ndeti snuck onto the set and took the modem, which he believed would serve well as a "smashing" utensil.
IBM officials were not surprised the longtime computer giant was able to provide Ndeti with practical solutions to his everyday problems. "Our telecommunications systems offer people all over the world global networking solutions that fit their specific needs," said Herbert Ross, IBM's director of marketing. "Whether you're a nun cloistered in an Italian abbey or an Aborigine in Australia's Great Sandy Desert, IBM has the ideas to get you where you want to go today."
According to Ndeti, of the modem's many powerful features, most impressive was its hard plastic casing, which easily sustained several minutes of vigorous pounding against a large stone. "I put the nut on a rock, and I hit it with the modem," Ndeti said. "The modem did not break. It is a good modem."
Ndeti was so impressed with the modem that he purchased a new, state-of- the-art IBM workstation, complete with a PowerPC 601 microprocessor, a quad-speed internal CD-ROM drive and three 16-bit ethernet networking connectors. The tribesman has already made good use of the computer system, fashioning a gazelle trap out of its wires, a boat anchor out of the monitor and a crude but effective weapon from its mouse.
"This is a good computer," said Ndeti, carving up a just-captured gazelle with the computer's flat, sharp internal processing device. "I am using every part of it. I will cook this gazelle on the keyboard." Hours later, Ndeti capped off his delicious gazelle dinner by smoking the computer's 200-page owner's manual.
IBM spokespeople praised Ndeti's choice of computers. "We are pleased that the Bantu people are turning to IBM for their business needs," said company CEO William Allaire. "From Kansas City to Kinshasa, IBM is bringing the world closer together. Our cutting-edge technology is truly creating a global village."
I don't know, but the bottled water industry seems to be doing pretty well...
Every time this analogy comes up, I am astonished at its ignorance. If you think that software is as easy to produce as water, you have clearly never written a line of code yourself.
It is certainly true that IBM is fully behind Linux, but that has little to do with any commitment to Open Source!
When is IBM going to release the code to its most strategic software products, such as WebSphere, DB2, or zOS? When hell freezes over, that's when! According to Software Magazine, IBM makes more than $40 billion from its closed-source software right now. Do you think it is going to throw all of that licensing revenue away just to eke out a few more dollars from service or hardware opportunities? No way! IBM's software packages are highly leveraged cash cows, and all of the "street cred" with the hacker community in the world wouldn't justify sacrificing them. Everyone talks about the $1B that IBM is spending on Linux, but you don't hear as much about the $1B that it is spending on WebSphere, which it develops and releases the old-fashioned way -- with proprietary code and very high-margin licensing fees.
Make no mistake, IBM believes in the traditional software business just as much as Microsoft or Oracle. Its embrace of Linux as an operating system is simply a tactical manuver to gain leverage in adjacent software, service, and hardware markets.
Several years ago, a ham radio operator told me that some russian cosmonauts bounced off the earth's atmosphere in the late 1960's. Apparently, they tried to reenter at just the wrong angle and "skidded" off the atmosphere into deep space without any way of returning. According to the source, ham operators worldwide were able to eavesdrop on the related radio activity (which was the only way the story got out, since the Soviet government at that time still kept secret all news topics that couldn't be reported with a positive spin).
Recently, a sceptical colleague objected that this was impossible due to the laws of physics. The objector claimed that the craft would have slowed under any circustances because of its momentum and effects of the atmosphere, even if it meant burning up. However, he related a story he had heard much earlier (early 1960's?) in which AM radios, if tuned to a certain channel, could pick up a fading signal of the heartbeat of a marooned astronaut. Yet another acquaintance claimed that is was actually the first female cosmonaut who had been marooned.
Has any one else heard any more variations of this story? Is this just a reoccuring ham radio "fish story", or is there some factual basis? Also, would an object leaving orbit like that eventually return, even years later?
The last time I checked, the Gnutella development team was waiting until to release its source code until "Version 1.0" was ready. I know that the protocol spec is open, and that a number of clones are available that work just fine, but I always thought it was odd that the original did not actually appear to be Open Source. Are there any restrictions on using the term "Gnu" in a product name without making the source available?
If Microsoft or some other company wanted to make their own distribution, or fork the kernel their own way, they are certainly free to do so
Except they couldn't call it "Linux", because Linus holds the trademark to the Linux name, and he can license it as he pleases. If Linus doesn't like where the forked product is going, he can withhold the right to call it Linux, which would dramatically restrict the forked product's market potential.
This appears similar to the way Sun controls Java. The Java language is based an "open" specification, meaning that anyone can create their own implementation of the APIs that Sun publishes. However, to actually call the implementation "Java" (which Sun has trademarked), the implementation must pass Sun's "conformance tests", which it controls alone.
Yep, while this may seem like just one of many recent announcements of clustering products for Linux, LifeKeeper is a little different because it is based on proven high-availability (HA) technology that many Fortune 500 companies, including Chase Manhattan Bank and AT&T, use on a day-to-day basis to insure that business-critical applications keep running under any circumstances. LifeKeeper was originally developed by NCR for its MP-RAS UNIX, where it competed head-to-head with UNIX-based HA clustering products from heavy-weights such as IBM and HP. NCR later ported LifeKeeper to Windows NT and Solaris, and when the company got out of the general systems business to focus on the retail market, it sold the technology off to Steeleye, a start-up founded by a group of industry veterans which is now doing the port to Linux. Steeleye's functional overview of LifeKeeper for Linux is here, and NCR still maintains detailed documentation for LifeKeeper here.
The availability of LifeKeeper directly from Compaq is a big step forward for the deployment of Linux systems in enterprise environments because HA clusters need to be tested and supported on a system basis, i.e. HW and SW together.
The AS/400 uses a relational database as a universal data store for all system, application, and user data resources. The database is protected with very fine-grained access privileges and managed with well-defined administrative tools, which dramatically boosts security (since there is only one global security mechanism to manage all system and application resources).
This approach also simplifies development, which helps to make the AS/400 such a powerful application engine.
Mainframes implement some of the most proven security mechanisms in the industry, and have rightfully gained a reputation for providing exceptionally secure environments. Still, even though most high-profile security breaches seem to occur on Windows or UNIX systems, mainframes can be hacked as well if all the "back doors" aren't secured. A two-part session at this summer's SHARE conference reviewed procedures for protecting IBM S/390 mainframes from break-ins. Here are links to the .PDF files of the presentations used for Part 1 and Part 2 of the session.
...DIDN'T SELL OUT AND USE THE GIFT FOR PERSONAL FINANCIAL GAME
Yup, this will incur the raft of the community, all right.
TurboLinux Cluster Server provides High Availability functions that boosts uptime for services such as Web serving, mail hosting, news, and FTP. TurboLinux also has a high-performance clustering product called EnFuzion.
Red Hat provides a package called High Availability Server that includes load balancing, fault tolerance, and improved scalability for IP-based applications.
--Loge
However, taking into account Ahmdahl coefficients (how efficiently a multi-processor or multi-computer parallelises for a particular problem), and the fact that inter-computer connections would be both slow _and_ very high latency....
The applications that are deployed on these types of systems are "embarassingly parallel", i.e. specifically designed to be largely independent of inter-process synchronization, which makes them immune to Amdahl's law. This is what allows these types of supercomputers to be implemented by lashing hundreds or thousands of processors together. In theory, the number of processors is limited only by a) cost, and b) management tools that allow the systems to be operated by rational means.
When you buy software, you are actually purchasing a license to use to the software, and vendors routinely insert clauses in their license agreements that help them meet their goals in the marketplace.
For example, Netscape prohibits publishing benchmarks in the license agreement for its Client software. The games developer Apogee (a.k.a. 3DRealms) even added a clause to its license agreement earlier this year that prevented negative reviews of its product! So Microsoft is really not acting unusually harsh in this regard.
Some of the commercially-developed UNIX systems have successfully used this feature to handle enterprise workloads. For example, HP-UX has long derived a unique advantage from its Dynamic Memory Resilience feature, which allows a server to sustain single-bit errors (see HP-UX 11i specs). If the Linux implementation of this function can also be made to work dynamically, i.e. fence off memory that goes bad during runtime, it will be a huge step forward for establishing Linux as a true enterprise alternative.
NDS would be a useless wart on the rump of Linux. It's for managing large numbers of file and print servers, not internet/intranet servers like Linux. Linux already has vastly superior internet directory capabilities.
Just out of curiosity, does anyone know what he is referring to here?
There have been several stories about about this during the past few weeks, but none seem to mention which OS will be used. Will it be Linux? After all, Crusoe does not yet run anything else, does it?
And dont't forget AIX PS/2, IBM's short-lived SCO competitor based on BSD.
That's right, a realistic positioning of Linux would be far more useful, even if it has to point out some of Linux's shortcomings to help IT managers plan its proper deployment.
Hey, even Linus himself admits that Linux still has limitations.
Publius, Freenet, Napster, and Gnutella all simply represent the next step in the development of full-fledged system software for the Internet. The Web browser effectively provided a global, read-only file system for the Internet, and these engines are attempts to standardize the method used to locate content on that file system independently of any single search site such as Yahoo or Google.
Piracy is only the killer app that is driving these technologies into the mainstream. Their real value will emerge when developers start to code next-generation applications that are built on them from the ground up for a variety of new applications, yet unimagined. All of this is part of a pendulum-swing away from the centralized, server-centric computing that has been in fashion for the past few years, and back towards client-oriented, peer-to-peer applications that take full advantage of desktop hardware.
every time I run across something completely inexplicable (to me, anyway) it's always nice to eventually discovered exactly why its implementation was so inscrutable
Well, except some decisions appear to have been made near-randomly. For example, I recall an interview with Ken Thompson a few years back in which he was asked what he would have done differently if he could design UNIX all over again. His answer? He would have put an "e" at the end of creat().