I think Novell's strategy with SLED isn't to bill it as a wholesale replacement for XP in the general desktop, but for "edge" workstations, like help desk people. I personally think it'd be great for a developer machine -- if you were a Java or Web developer, at least.
But if they want to be successful at all, they'll need to nail these two things:
1) Marketing 2) Alleviating fears about training and support.
And Novell has been known to suck at (1) -- and it's going to be all uphill for (2). But good luck to them, because we need more variety in computing to keep MS on their toes and valuing their developers more so that they actually have to compete on merits for a change.
I don't think religion in the problem so much as what I would "pep-rally mentality", the fury of a crowd for their furor, whatever it may be. A secular society can assert just as much control over the masses through propaganda. Corporations have this even now in the form of commercials.
I think when societies go to war, it's because they are materialistic: their "gods", the things they worship/most value/are guided by/believe in are just idols, temporal things, such as land, wealth, and power. They attempt to cloak their greed with intonation and ceremony, as if God has a button they can push to please him, but this is just a god of their invention, and not God.
Religion is not the problem: propaganda is. It can be both religious and non-religious.
I don't feel as though I suffer from a mental imbalance or anything!
I'm kind of confused why you think atheism is necessary in order to move forward as a society. So we can no longer be controlled? What about atheistic communist countries? Control still exists there.
I don't think we're easily exploited because most of us believe in God; I believe it's because most people want to believe in men ahead of God: religious people are just particularly dangerous at this because they project their adoration for God onto men like the Pope or the President. But it is still possible for men to set themselves up as figureheads without the use of God -- they still use religion, but the religion is not centered on heavenly things; rather, it focuses on the icons of state.
But seriously -- geez! -- why does belief in God automatically have to qualify me for a mental illness?
Great point. I guess the biggest problem of the word "God" is that no one can really define what it means.
There is a Bible passage that goes, "God is love".
But what is God? What is love? You'll get a million different answers. The Bible says the answer to this question is that God became a man and drew the evil and pain of the world into himself, nullifying it through his experience of it firsthand.
Microsoft's Open XML is just a delay tactic -- their old strategy of vaporware vaporware vaporware... that sometimes materializes at the last second, never as grand as promised, but having accomplished it's goal of causing everyone to say "Let's wait and see what Microsoft will do first!"
I believe in God, obviously, so I was set off a bit. I shouldn't really care, though, how other people think. Actions are what matter, after all.
I do agree that religion is foolish; I see it as a way of objectifying God, reducing him into an idol, a utility. And as a utility, religion is indeed unnecessary.
God is just a part of me, though. I don't know WHAT he is as much as WHO he is. He's at the core of who I am, and to deny God would be to deny my own existence. I don't feel any handicapped by this any more than I feel that breathing or a pulse is a handicap, or that my love for my wife is a useless reliance and a weakness.
God and I are good friends. He communicates with me on a daily basis, using events in my own life around me as his vocal chords.
And I doubt mean to make it sound as if I have a special connection that elevates my status, because the way I see it, God is not above me or you. There is no hierarchy, so there is no elevation of status through association.
It's merely an instinct. I tried denying it for years, but I eventually had to come to accept it as intrinsic to who I am. That's the kind of creature I am. Perhaps you are just different sorts of creatures.
I see the scientific, testable aspect of God as being Love. That we can all share, despite our internal universes that define who we are.
Sorry to sound spiteful, but I get so tired of people infringing on my right to what I see as reality.
Yes, I believe there is a God. I wake up, and I feel like I'm staring him in the face all day. I can't give you any more evidence for God than I can give you for myself as a true consciousness. But instinctively I know God is with me just as I can say, "I am".
If that somehow makes me crippled in other people's eyes, then so be it. But God is a part of me, and to deny that would be to deny who I am.
So this article proposes we'll be using thin clients that are little more than browsers. Perhaps. What is a browser but a code-delivery mechanism? You receive HTML, Javascript, Flash, and even -- God forbid -- ActiveX and Applets.
Now, what are some other code-delivery mechanisms? apt-get immediately comes to mind. How about Java Web Start?
Just because we're receiving code from the internet and running it on our own machines, doesn't mean we're part of an Internet OS.
Google has barely started. They're simply positioning their pieces right now. Their strategy is obviously a sneaky one: tiptoe up behind your opponents without drawing too much attention to yourself by openly beta-testing a variety of services, and then at the perfect moment, deliver the killing blow with the "kernel" of your plan that suddenly brings all these disparate services together into a nuke of integration. That kernel, for them, of course, is search.
What is search? It can be a lot of things, but in its finest form, it resembles what is popularly termed "AI". Can you imagine what Google could achieve by using search to suddenly unify all of its services? You get an email in Gmail about a picnic on the 23rd, and it's hyperlinked to a command that will put it in your Google Calendar. That's a simple scenario. Few seem to imagine search as an integration platform, like the GUI, but it is; it's not just for finding things.
I imagine the future of search to be a lot like how the ever-present computer voice in Star Trek could do almost anything for you. When computers are this sophisticated, what's the point of most GUIs? Just tell your computer what you want. GUIs can then be minimal and non-intrusive.
Now, the biggest complaint I hear about Google's services is that they have to be accessed online via a browser. Well, did you know that Firefox 3 is going to support the ability to run web applications offline?
While the web culture and the PC culture have a lot of users in common, there are also many who belong more to either one group or the other.
For those users who are part of the web culture, IE has already lost the browser wars to Firefox. Most PC users who grew up with the Internet and feel comfortable with searching and downloading have already switched to Firefox.
IE will always be the dominant browser for the PC culture, however, because of pre-installation, and because most people who are part of this culture feel comfortable with Microsoft products despite their poor quality in many cases.
Their mission is to organize the world's information and make it accessible to everyone. But Google doesn't really "organize information" so much as provide an organized view of information -- and that means creating user interfaces. Of course, this is what worries Microsoft, because as of now, they're the most common interface people use to bridge the gap between humans and technology, but search engines and portals like Google and Yahoo are quickly becoming the most common and important interfaces.
So I'm sure Google wants to experiment with and learn as many interface models as possible, since different information requires different kinds of organization and presentation. As far as I'm concerned, they've nailed email and maps, though still have a ways to go with many of their other services.
(As an aside, we can probably expect more integration of these services in the future. Google probably keeps all the data created via its services in a form similar to the Semantic Web -- just a proprietary version of it. I suspect that just as the relatively high level of integration provided by Microsoft applications raised people's expectations and led to a new era of cooperation between the non-MS tech companies, so also the level of integration Google's services provide for the web will be the driving factor that leads to increased collaboration in the Semantic Web: the push for a neutral commodity platform.)
The new services model is not software-as-a-service, like MS thinks it is. The service is not the software itself. A service can be implemented as software. A service can also be implemented as human technicians. But the price of software by itself, as a separate entity, is fast approaching $0. Hence, in the open source model, you build services around software -- be they software-driven services like the Red Hat Network, or human-driven services like on-call support people.
But renting software? That's ridiculous.
Premium software as a product is not going anywhere. But there's a certain level of commodization now, that people aren't going to be willing to rent or eventually even buy, like office suites.
I tend to think of software-as-a-service not just as HTML/Javascript/XML delivered over the Web, but also as packages downloaded from a distro repository. Isn't the open source software repository model a software-as-a-service model, too?
But hasn't Google already pretty much hired up all the experts on search algorithms and data analysis in the world? Well, probably not _all_ of them, but the smartest, and MS is getting second pickings at best (though Yahoo probably knows this space better than MS). I haven't heard of any developer defections from Google to Microsoft -- rather, it's been the other way around.
So what if Microsoft has tons of cash? Money doesn't magically transform into innovation -- it takes brilliant people to do that. Microsoft has some brilliant developers in the OS and middleware spaces (as well as marketing and lawyers) but not search. That talent all works at Google and Yahoo now.
Search is all about results, and it's not easy to fake and fluff over with marketing. And just being able to afford the infrastructure means squat if your algorithms are second-rate.
This is great! Now Linux development can equally support the Big Three: Java,.NET (Mono), and the P-languages (plus one R)!
The next step... get it all to run on Parrot! Convergence like none other, bwa ha ha huh!
It's not cash that makes a company (though that helps); it's the people who work there.
MS used to have the most talented engineers in the world. Now that title belongs to Google and a host of start-ups.
If having the most money doesn't give them the brightest developers in the world, does that mean they're the most powerful company? Because they could potentially spend 10 billion in a few years to "catch up"? I don't even think stockholders would allow MS to spend that much.
Money is like fuel, and MS is like the obsolete space shuttle -- most of the fuel goes towards lifting the weight of the fuel!
Now it makes better sense why Google was buying up all that dark fibre optic lines a year or two back. Why fight with legislation what you can fight with tech?
Now, if only all entrepreneurs could afford that sort of thing, haha.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, certainly not that kind of help desk! If you helping people with computer problems, Windows is probably what you'd want to use, definitely.
I was thinking more along the lines of company info help desk.
Most enterprises aren't using 1.5 yet. Business moves slow into tech until it's very well-tested.
The company I work for actually just recently moved to 1.4.
I think Novell's strategy with SLED isn't to bill it as a wholesale replacement for XP in the general desktop, but for "edge" workstations, like help desk people. I personally think it'd be great for a developer machine -- if you were a Java or Web developer, at least.
But if they want to be successful at all, they'll need to nail these two things:
1) Marketing
2) Alleviating fears about training and support.
And Novell has been known to suck at (1) -- and it's going to be all uphill for (2). But good luck to them, because we need more variety in computing to keep MS on their toes and valuing their developers more so that they actually have to compete on merits for a change.
So what kind of article were you expecting from a guy called "Mad Penguin"?
Different strokes for differnent folks. I enjoy Mad Penguin's crazy style, and so do others. That's why we read him.
Also consider the massacre in Rwanda -- it was secular in nature. Hatred was inspired for the Tutsi "cockroaches" without the use of religion.
I don't think religion in the problem so much as what I would "pep-rally mentality", the fury of a crowd for their furor, whatever it may be. A secular society can assert just as much control over the masses through propaganda. Corporations have this even now in the form of commercials.
I think when societies go to war, it's because they are materialistic: their "gods", the things they worship/most value/are guided by/believe in are just idols, temporal things, such as land, wealth, and power. They attempt to cloak their greed with intonation and ceremony, as if God has a button they can push to please him, but this is just a god of their invention, and not God.
Religion is not the problem: propaganda is. It can be both religious and non-religious.
I don't feel as though I suffer from a mental imbalance or anything!
I'm kind of confused why you think atheism is necessary in order to move forward as a society. So we can no longer be controlled? What about atheistic communist countries? Control still exists there.
I don't think we're easily exploited because most of us believe in God; I believe it's because most people want to believe in men ahead of God: religious people are just particularly dangerous at this because they project their adoration for God onto men like the Pope or the President. But it is still possible for men to set themselves up as figureheads without the use of God -- they still use religion, but the religion is not centered on heavenly things; rather, it focuses on the icons of state.
But seriously -- geez! -- why does belief in God automatically have to qualify me for a mental illness?
Great point. I guess the biggest problem of the word "God" is that no one can really define what it means.
There is a Bible passage that goes, "God is love".
But what is God? What is love? You'll get a million different answers. The Bible says the answer to this question is that God became a man and drew the evil and pain of the world into himself, nullifying it through his experience of it firsthand.
Microsoft's Open XML is just a delay tactic -- their old strategy of vaporware vaporware vaporware ... that sometimes materializes at the last second, never as grand as promised, but having accomplished it's goal of causing everyone to say "Let's wait and see what Microsoft will do first!"
And MOX is Latin for "soon". Coincidence?!
yeah, prolly
BUT: a cute synchronicity, nonetheless.
I'm fine ;)
Alright, this comment of mine was silly.
I believe in God, obviously, so I was set off a bit. I shouldn't really care, though, how other people think. Actions are what matter, after all.
I do agree that religion is foolish; I see it as a way of objectifying God, reducing him into an idol, a utility. And as a utility, religion is indeed unnecessary.
God is just a part of me, though. I don't know WHAT he is as much as WHO he is. He's at the core of who I am, and to deny God would be to deny my own existence. I don't feel any handicapped by this any more than I feel that breathing or a pulse is a handicap, or that my love for my wife is a useless reliance and a weakness.
God and I are good friends. He communicates with me on a daily basis, using events in my own life around me as his vocal chords.
And I doubt mean to make it sound as if I have a special connection that elevates my status, because the way I see it, God is not above me or you. There is no hierarchy, so there is no elevation of status through association.
It's merely an instinct. I tried denying it for years, but I eventually had to come to accept it as intrinsic to who I am. That's the kind of creature I am. Perhaps you are just different sorts of creatures.
I see the scientific, testable aspect of God as being Love. That we can all share, despite our internal universes that define who we are.
Yes, I'm sorry for that. I just get a bit spunky at times is all. I'm a very strong believer in God, but I shouldn't be touchy about it.
Sorry to sound spiteful, but I get so tired of people infringing on my right to what I see as reality.
Yes, I believe there is a God. I wake up, and I feel like I'm staring him in the face all day. I can't give you any more evidence for God than I can give you for myself as a true consciousness. But instinctively I know God is with me just as I can say, "I am".
If that somehow makes me crippled in other people's eyes, then so be it. But God is a part of me, and to deny that would be to deny who I am.
Are you implying that atheism is a higher evolutionary step, and therefore, you're in a more evolved state than most people?
Have you considered that arrogance could be your opiate?
So this article proposes we'll be using thin clients that are little more than browsers. Perhaps. What is a browser but a code-delivery mechanism? You receive HTML, Javascript, Flash, and even -- God forbid -- ActiveX and Applets.
Now, what are some other code-delivery mechanisms? apt-get immediately comes to mind. How about Java Web Start?
Just because we're receiving code from the internet and running it on our own machines, doesn't mean we're part of an Internet OS.
The closest this to that I've seen is here:
http://redfoot.net/
Google has barely started. They're simply positioning their pieces right now. Their strategy is obviously a sneaky one: tiptoe up behind your opponents without drawing too much attention to yourself by openly beta-testing a variety of services, and then at the perfect moment, deliver the killing blow with the "kernel" of your plan that suddenly brings all these disparate services together into a nuke of integration. That kernel, for them, of course, is search.
What is search? It can be a lot of things, but in its finest form, it resembles what is popularly termed "AI". Can you imagine what Google could achieve by using search to suddenly unify all of its services? You get an email in Gmail about a picnic on the 23rd, and it's hyperlinked to a command that will put it in your Google Calendar. That's a simple scenario. Few seem to imagine search as an integration platform, like the GUI, but it is; it's not just for finding things.
I imagine the future of search to be a lot like how the ever-present computer voice in Star Trek could do almost anything for you. When computers are this sophisticated, what's the point of most GUIs? Just tell your computer what you want. GUIs can then be minimal and non-intrusive.
Now, the biggest complaint I hear about Google's services is that they have to be accessed online via a browser. Well, did you know that Firefox 3 is going to support the ability to run web applications offline?
-- random_blankspace attica ya-know-hoo dottius commius
While the web culture and the PC culture have a lot of users in common, there are also many who belong more to either one group or the other.
For those users who are part of the web culture, IE has already lost the browser wars to Firefox. Most PC users who grew up with the Internet and feel comfortable with searching and downloading have already switched to Firefox.
IE will always be the dominant browser for the PC culture, however, because of pre-installation, and because most people who are part of this culture feel comfortable with Microsoft products despite their poor quality in many cases.
Their mission is to organize the world's information and make it accessible to everyone. But Google doesn't really "organize information" so much as provide an organized view of information -- and that means creating user interfaces. Of course, this is what worries Microsoft, because as of now, they're the most common interface people use to bridge the gap between humans and technology, but search engines and portals like Google and Yahoo are quickly becoming the most common and important interfaces.
So I'm sure Google wants to experiment with and learn as many interface models as possible, since different information requires different kinds of organization and presentation. As far as I'm concerned, they've nailed email and maps, though still have a ways to go with many of their other services.
(As an aside, we can probably expect more integration of these services in the future. Google probably keeps all the data created via its services in a form similar to the Semantic Web -- just a proprietary version of it. I suspect that just as the relatively high level of integration provided by Microsoft applications raised people's expectations and led to a new era of cooperation between the non-MS tech companies, so also the level of integration Google's services provide for the web will be the driving factor that leads to increased collaboration in the Semantic Web: the push for a neutral commodity platform.)
The U.S. is pretty evil too. I hope they pull out of there.
The new services model is not software-as-a-service, like MS thinks it is. The service is not the software itself. A service can be implemented as software. A service can also be implemented as human technicians. But the price of software by itself, as a separate entity, is fast approaching $0. Hence, in the open source model, you build services around software -- be they software-driven services like the Red Hat Network, or human-driven services like on-call support people.
But renting software? That's ridiculous.
Premium software as a product is not going anywhere. But there's a certain level of commodization now, that people aren't going to be willing to rent or eventually even buy, like office suites.
I tend to think of software-as-a-service not just as HTML/Javascript/XML delivered over the Web, but also as packages downloaded from a distro repository. Isn't the open source software repository model a software-as-a-service model, too?
But hasn't Google already pretty much hired up all the experts on search algorithms and data analysis in the world? Well, probably not _all_ of them, but the smartest, and MS is getting second pickings at best (though Yahoo probably knows this space better than MS). I haven't heard of any developer defections from Google to Microsoft -- rather, it's been the other way around.
l 2005/tc20050728_5...
So what if Microsoft has tons of cash? Money doesn't magically transform into innovation -- it takes brilliant people to do that. Microsoft has some brilliant developers in the OS and middleware spaces (as well as marketing and lawyers) but not search. That talent all works at Google and Yahoo now.
Not to mention a lot of the old UNIX, Internet, and Web gurus work there too: http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/ju
Search is all about results, and it's not easy to fake and fluff over with marketing. And just being able to afford the infrastructure means squat if your algorithms are second-rate.
This is great! Now Linux development can equally support the Big Three: Java, .NET (Mono), and the P-languages (plus one R)!
The next step ... get it all to run on Parrot! Convergence like none other, bwa ha ha huh!
It's not cash that makes a company (though that helps); it's the people who work there.
MS used to have the most talented engineers in the world. Now that title belongs to Google and a host of start-ups.
If having the most money doesn't give them the brightest developers in the world, does that mean they're the most powerful company? Because they could potentially spend 10 billion in a few years to "catch up"? I don't even think stockholders would allow MS to spend that much.
Money is like fuel, and MS is like the obsolete space shuttle -- most of the fuel goes towards lifting the weight of the fuel!
Now it makes better sense why Google was buying up all that dark fibre optic lines a year or two back. Why fight with legislation what you can fight with tech?
Now, if only all entrepreneurs could afford that sort of thing, haha.