It would be great if MS indeed ported their runtime environments and toolchain to Linux and Mac, maybe even Solaris, HP-UX and AIX. But no, I figure they'll keep all that stuff bolted to the millstone around their neck that is Windows. Besides, if they released all that stuff for the other OSes, do you really think they would be able to make as much money selling Windows? That OS is bought for everything that must run on top of it, not the OS itself.
In the meantime, Java allows the company I work for to accomplish far more than we could have with.NET anyhow (JMS, JMX, Spring framework, Maven, EJB 3 come to mind), and we're not tied to any one vendor -- we play IBM, Redhat, and Oracle off each other for better deals. As far as I can tell,.NET is more of a competitor with J2SE and PHP.
So if I were a company evaluating whether to choose Novell over Redhat based solely on the Microsoft deal, I would definitely choose Redhat. Novel's deal with Microsoft has so many exceptions in it (doesn't cover "clone" or "foundry" or "other" products) and contridictions between the two companies (GPLv3 is/isn't covered) that all it seems to do get Microsoft's attention better for their "who could we sue" list. Because the deal surely doesn't protect you from getting sued, given all the exceptions.
I would rather go with Redhat where there's far less confusion going on. They offer protection anyways, through OIN.
How about instead of consumers surrendering all their data to centrally controlled third parties, those third parties send us their code to run locally on our data. Oh wait, I just described an open source distro repository, lol.
Great! Big stupid corporations who drink heartily from MS's teets will languish under higher expenses for lower quality software, giving younger nimble companies willing to *risk* (zomg) Linux deployments an edge in the competition! New wine for new wineskins.
Doesn't Microsoft wanting to collect royalties from Linux vendors strangely mirror how the RIAA also wants royalties from all these other sources? Both are quite similar, strangleholds on the traditional distribution channels, aka robber barons, who strike out at any alternate form of distribution. Both groups are making gobs of cash, but they're also dependent on that ridiculously huge cash flow to prove sustainability of their models. MS makes insanely huge profits, but if they started to dip, investors would question whether their model was not just a flash in the pan, though a big one, nonetheless. MS's moolas don't neccessarily translate directly into success: it doesn't scale with man-hours cranking out great code, and it doesn't mean the price reflects their product's real value (how many times over have we payed for the same millions of the lines of Windows code?), just that they're really the only option to run Win32 applications.
Wow! And aren't the Japanese getting ready to migrate to this non-existant software ecosystem? How very philosophically Eastern of them! It's like some sort of crazy Zen thing!
I don't think Microsoft is dying so much as it's still reaping the benefits of its strategic moves from the late 90s. But if you look at where the pieces are moving for the next 10 years, MS has not found itself a very advantageous position: slowly but surely, commodization is moving up the stack, from x86 hardware to compilers and networking to the OS and general-purpose applications. The main reason for Microsoft's success in recent years has been its tight integration between client and server, which the EU is now contending isn't innovative but merely obfusgation.
From a business standpoint, I love MS because they've made many of us wealthier because of the consolidation they've brought to the industry. From a computer science standpoint, I detest them because of the monoculture and lack of robustness in their code given how much money they in turn make. I wonder where all our dollars go, apparently not back into the product. Another fear is always that if your software becomes popular enough, MS will surely assimilate your idea with their own cloneware and bundle it with the next OS update. Then you're hosed.
I think even more money will go around for all of us as Linux becomes more widespread and its userbase encompasses more customers willing to pay for software. Then not so much cash will be flowing into a single company, but into many different ones.
Re:Nowhere else for Palm to go...
on
Palm to go Linux
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
"There would have been no cheap Linux today if Microsoft hadn't flattened/commoditized the computer hardware market by the start of the 1990's."
Because somehow Microsoft doing this inspired Linus Torvalds to create a MINIX-like free kernel for research purposes?
Or because Windows made x86 popular (rather than the other way around)? Yet I still don't even see how that would've mattered one way or the other to the creation of Linux.
I think a good analogy would be to see life not as a tree, which would be a lot of ARBORtrary (haha, I'm here all night folks) boundaries, but to see it as a kind of river. It's a liquid force, trickling into places that yield to them.
What's so amazing about life, though, when you get down to the core of it, is it's DRIVE. Why the hell has the universe produced such a thing, when it's paradoxically so blind to its existence? Actually, life seems more like fire than like water -- why why why does it... *want* to ~live~ so *badly*?
Science is a tool that lets us get useful, predictable results out of nature, and tells us something about how we interact with the Universe. By all intents and purposes, it's an extension of our fingers -- we can "touch" things with our minds, thanks to science, and know them through that.
Religion, on the other hand, is what allows us to keep on touching and knowing things without feeling the weight of the meaningless chaos and nothingness of the Universe bear down on us. For some people, science is their art, it's their skill, and they find solace in discovery.
But should that be the only avenue towards finding meaning for our lives? I think that would be a bit ethnocentric to conclude. Yet that's also not to say, anything and everything is acceptable, because we do have a society to maintain.
And wasn't life created on the primordial earth by lightning?
Hahah, I'm just being playful. So take no offense.
And I wonder, has anyone thought up an experiment to prove or disprove God? That sure would be useful! But a God that responds to stimuli doesn't seem like an omnipotent will to me....
Oh well... at the end of the day, God is too big a concept for anyone to grasp anyway. Functionally, "all you need is love". Of course, that too is a bit abstract. So I would like to amend that to, "you have a friend in me".
Just someone tell me PLEASE how I can get the UP navigation button in Windows Explorer? My job just forced us all to upgrade to Vista, and our laptops can *barely* run it plus IBM's RAD6 for development. And no up button is just the straw, you know, the freakin' straw.
Well, I'm posting this from Ubuntu Edgy at home right now at least.:-D
Not supernova, superSCOva. They're gong to turn into a mega-SCO that will last for many many years I'm afraid. There are too many signs that they're not able to compete technologically anymore: if they clone Google's services, then they remove some of their own lock-in ability and undercut their $100 to $400 office licenses, canabilizing themselves. So litigation is going to be their play when they find that not every open source company is going to want to buy licenses from them because some nebulous unidentified MS IP might be somewhere in FLOSS. That's already very SCO-like.
IBM is still around because they make gobs of cash from an extremely diverse portfolio. MS: only Windows and Office generate enough revenue to matter to the company. I don't doubt MS will come through it much like Sun has come through their own implosion, but even IBM avoided a huge drop like Sun, Cray, Xerox, or AT&T did back at the end of their own heydays.
Science today, Myth tomorrow. Either is just a framework for modeling reality, which satisfies our questioning and curious nature, and gives us hope for the future.
Life thrives on the irrational notion that it is superior to nonlife, that existence has a manifest destiny in relation to nonexistance.
But objective reality, the asteroids and supernovae, they don't make this distinction. To "them", life is just more atoms.
sounds like the universe is just another one of those damn dandelions in my yard: it turns white, pops, and sends the seeds around to invest my yard with more of their damn yellow Somethingness on my perfect bed of green Nothingness.
-- old man Void
Usually when the bible or related pagan religions (such as caananite or egyptian) refer to the "four corners of heaven", it's more than likely they're making a reference to the four heavenly calendar points: the autumnal and vernal equinoxes, and the summer and winter solstices. it has been for the majority of human civiliation that the earth has been understood to be curved -- an easy observation for even ancient scientists to make when watching a ship "sink" below the horizon or watching the sky shift as one changes latitudes.
Because the future is filled with so so many devices, the winner in "operating systems" will be those which are the most portable. And in that category, we have four clear winners for different parts of the software stack:
Linux: most portable kernel for talking to the hardware. GNU: most portable userspace. JVM: most portable VM for taking to userspace and scripting languages. Mozilla: most portable platform for web collaboration, especially if Firefox 3 goes forward with the "information broker" role it wants to fulfill.
These four levels give us a good solid platform for the shifting hardware landscape. Because no matter what, everything always comes back to physical devices, physical presence of some kind.
Slashdot Mirror
Just put him in charge already! Mono is probably MS's future anyhow.
It would be great if MS indeed ported their runtime environments and toolchain to Linux and Mac, maybe even Solaris, HP-UX and AIX. But no, I figure they'll keep all that stuff bolted to the millstone around their neck that is Windows. Besides, if they released all that stuff for the other OSes, do you really think they would be able to make as much money selling Windows? That OS is bought for everything that must run on top of it, not the OS itself.
.NET anyhow (JMS, JMX, Spring framework, Maven, EJB 3 come to mind), and we're not tied to any one vendor -- we play IBM, Redhat, and Oracle off each other for better deals. As far as I can tell, .NET is more of a competitor with J2SE and PHP.
In the meantime, Java allows the company I work for to accomplish far more than we could have with
So if I were a company evaluating whether to choose Novell over Redhat based solely on the Microsoft deal, I would definitely choose Redhat. Novel's deal with Microsoft has so many exceptions in it (doesn't cover "clone" or "foundry" or "other" products) and contridictions between the two companies (GPLv3 is/isn't covered) that all it seems to do get Microsoft's attention better for their "who could we sue" list. Because the deal surely doesn't protect you from getting sued, given all the exceptions.
I would rather go with Redhat where there's far less confusion going on. They offer protection anyways, through OIN.
How about instead of consumers surrendering all their data to centrally controlled third parties, those third parties send us their code to run locally on our data. Oh wait, I just described an open source distro repository, lol.
Unless it can kill people, the U.S. as a government won't bother funding it.
Great! Big stupid corporations who drink heartily from MS's teets will languish under higher expenses for lower quality software, giving younger nimble companies willing to *risk* (zomg) Linux deployments an edge in the competition! New wine for new wineskins.
Doesn't Microsoft wanting to collect royalties from Linux vendors strangely mirror how the RIAA also wants royalties from all these other sources? Both are quite similar, strangleholds on the traditional distribution channels, aka robber barons, who strike out at any alternate form of distribution. Both groups are making gobs of cash, but they're also dependent on that ridiculously huge cash flow to prove sustainability of their models. MS makes insanely huge profits, but if they started to dip, investors would question whether their model was not just a flash in the pan, though a big one, nonetheless. MS's moolas don't neccessarily translate directly into success: it doesn't scale with man-hours cranking out great code, and it doesn't mean the price reflects their product's real value (how many times over have we payed for the same millions of the lines of Windows code?), just that they're really the only option to run Win32 applications.
Wow! And aren't the Japanese getting ready to migrate to this non-existant software ecosystem? How very philosophically Eastern of them! It's like some sort of crazy Zen thing!
"Open Source Exchange killer"
...?
More like an open source Groupwise killer. Later on Novell. Wonder if Red Hat is going to be purchasing another company soon
I don't think Microsoft is dying so much as it's still reaping the benefits of its strategic moves from the late 90s. But if you look at where the pieces are moving for the next 10 years, MS has not found itself a very advantageous position: slowly but surely, commodization is moving up the stack, from x86 hardware to compilers and networking to the OS and general-purpose applications. The main reason for Microsoft's success in recent years has been its tight integration between client and server, which the EU is now contending isn't innovative but merely obfusgation.
From a business standpoint, I love MS because they've made many of us wealthier because of the consolidation they've brought to the industry. From a computer science standpoint, I detest them because of the monoculture and lack of robustness in their code given how much money they in turn make. I wonder where all our dollars go, apparently not back into the product. Another fear is always that if your software becomes popular enough, MS will surely assimilate your idea with their own cloneware and bundle it with the next OS update. Then you're hosed.
I think even more money will go around for all of us as Linux becomes more widespread and its userbase encompasses more customers willing to pay for software. Then not so much cash will be flowing into a single company, but into many different ones.
"There would have been no cheap Linux today if Microsoft hadn't flattened/commoditized the computer hardware market by the start of the 1990's."
Because somehow Microsoft doing this inspired Linus Torvalds to create a MINIX-like free kernel for research purposes?
Or because Windows made x86 popular (rather than the other way around)? Yet I still don't even see how that would've mattered one way or the other to the creation of Linux.
NO, the sun is not light per se ... light is in a lot of things, in (and not in, heheh) a lot of places.
I think a good analogy would be to see life not as a tree, which would be a lot of ARBORtrary (haha, I'm here all night folks) boundaries, but to see it as a kind of river. It's a liquid force, trickling into places that yield to them.
... *want* to ~live~ so *badly*?
What's so amazing about life, though, when you get down to the core of it, is it's DRIVE. Why the hell has the universe produced such a thing, when it's paradoxically so blind to its existence? Actually, life seems more like fire than like water -- why why why does it
Science is a tool that lets us get useful, predictable results out of nature, and tells us something about how we interact with the Universe. By all intents and purposes, it's an extension of our fingers -- we can "touch" things with our minds, thanks to science, and know them through that.
Religion, on the other hand, is what allows us to keep on touching and knowing things without feeling the weight of the meaningless chaos and nothingness of the Universe bear down on us. For some people, science is their art, it's their skill, and they find solace in discovery.
But should that be the only avenue towards finding meaning for our lives? I think that would be a bit ethnocentric to conclude. Yet that's also not to say, anything and everything is acceptable, because we do have a society to maintain.
"God is Light" -- the Bible
....
... at the end of the day, God is too big a concept for anyone to grasp anyway. Functionally, "all you need is love". Of course, that too is a bit abstract. So I would like to amend that to, "you have a friend in me".
So, according to it, mutations are caused by God.
And wasn't life created on the primordial earth by lightning?
Hahah, I'm just being playful. So take no offense.
And I wonder, has anyone thought up an experiment to prove or disprove God? That sure would be useful! But a God that responds to stimuli doesn't seem like an omnipotent will to me
Oh well
Have a swell day, random dude.
Just someone tell me PLEASE how I can get the UP navigation button in Windows Explorer? My job just forced us all to upgrade to Vista, and our laptops can *barely* run it plus IBM's RAD6 for development. And no up button is just the straw, you know, the freakin' straw.
:-D
Well, I'm posting this from Ubuntu Edgy at home right now at least.
Not supernova, superSCOva. They're gong to turn into a mega-SCO that will last for many many years I'm afraid. There are too many signs that they're not able to compete technologically anymore: if they clone Google's services, then they remove some of their own lock-in ability and undercut their $100 to $400 office licenses, canabilizing themselves. So litigation is going to be their play when they find that not every open source company is going to want to buy licenses from them because some nebulous unidentified MS IP might be somewhere in FLOSS. That's already very SCO-like.
IBM is still around because they make gobs of cash from an extremely diverse portfolio. MS: only Windows and Office generate enough revenue to matter to the company. I don't doubt MS will come through it much like Sun has come through their own implosion, but even IBM avoided a huge drop like Sun, Cray, Xerox, or AT&T did back at the end of their own heydays.
MS is in a vice no doubt. Isn't it already now when Ballmer said that "MS would catch up to Google in six months?" heheh.
And they're stepping up the "veiled threats" against open source software.
Oh, I give it about 3 to 5 years before MS goes superSCOva.
And science/myth also gives us utility of course, whether it's for building nuclear reactors or a pyramid.
http://home.ccil.org/~cowan/mythopoeia.html
Science today, Myth tomorrow. Either is just a framework for modeling reality, which satisfies our questioning and curious nature, and gives us hope for the future.
Life thrives on the irrational notion that it is superior to nonlife, that existence has a manifest destiny in relation to nonexistance.
But objective reality, the asteroids and supernovae, they don't make this distinction. To "them", life is just more atoms.
[quote] Three words, no models necessary: "God"
What are the other two words?
[/quote]
"Why me?"
"Why is there a Universe?" "The previous Universe did it."
Questions of this scale are just too big for faith OR science, I think.
sounds like the universe is just another one of those damn dandelions in my yard: it turns white, pops, and sends the seeds around to invest my yard with more of their damn yellow Somethingness on my perfect bed of green Nothingness. -- old man Void
Usually when the bible or related pagan religions (such as caananite or egyptian) refer to the "four corners of heaven", it's more than likely they're making a reference to the four heavenly calendar points: the autumnal and vernal equinoxes, and the summer and winter solstices. it has been for the majority of human civiliation that the earth has been understood to be curved -- an easy observation for even ancient scientists to make when watching a ship "sink" below the horizon or watching the sky shift as one changes latitudes.
Because the future is filled with so so many devices, the winner in "operating systems" will be those which are the most portable. And in that category, we have four clear winners for different parts of the software stack:
Linux: most portable kernel for talking to the hardware.
GNU: most portable userspace.
JVM: most portable VM for taking to userspace and scripting languages.
Mozilla: most portable platform for web collaboration, especially if Firefox 3 goes forward with the "information broker" role it wants to fulfill.
These four levels give us a good solid platform for the shifting hardware landscape. Because no matter what, everything always comes back to physical devices, physical presence of some kind.