The Fox Business Channel will give Her Worship the right-wing national audience that she wants in the hope that she can parlay it into a leadership position in the Republican Party and possible future elective office. That would give her the chance to mess up the country the way she messed up HP.
The BestBuy closest to my home displays several different iMacs, but they don't really sell them in the sense that a sales person gives you a demonstration of the features, lets you play with it, and tells you why its a good choice. In addition, they only have their Mac-knowledgeable staff working on the weekends, and only about one out of every three of their stores carries Macs. So they are going to have to do a lot better than that if Apple is to increase their Mac sales over the holidays.
When a company or its products get a deservedly bad reputation, consultants often recommend that the company rename itself or its products in the hope that consumers won't remember the connection. Thus, ValuJet became AirTran and Retail Credit became Equifax. Enron is now Enron Creditors Recovery Corporation, but it's a pretty safe bet that any future operational parts of Enron will get a new, non-Enron game. So Diebold is just playing the same game in the hope that people are not paying careful attention.
Lots of great suggestions already. You might also want to read a good book on best practices for open source development projects. Karl Fogel's "Producing Open Source Software" is excellent and available in print form or free online here.
The message of the OSI is that "Open Source" has a specific meaning and that people who want to use the term for commercial marketing purposes should offer their software under a license that complies with the terms of the Open Source Definition. Their approach is not really very different from that of the Scotch Whisky Association, which protects the use of the term "Scotch whisky".
The OSI is focusing on companies that call their products and services "Open Source" when that is not really the case. Here are four examples where that can happen: 1) a company will release the source code for a product (under its own "non-approved" license), but will keep a more complete version of the product closed, releasing the product only in binary form under a traditional commercial license; 2) a company will start with open source software available under a BSD license, then close the product (permitted under the license) and release their product only in binary form under a traditional commercial license; 3) a company will start with open source software and use it to build a "Software as a Service" application available only as a web-based application, with no source code distribution at all. Most of the companies offering SaaS web applications avoid the use of "Open Source" to describe their services, so this example applies only to a small number of offenders.
I don't think that the OSI has any intention of going after people who put their non-commercial projects up on Source Forge (or some other forge). For those who do so, it's a good idea to associate an OSI-approved license with your work so that others who might want to use your software can be comfortable and secure about the terms and conditions under which it can be used.
I don't think that the spirit of free/libre/open source software would be well served by the release of the source code of Microsoft Office. Having looked at the code of other software products first introduced in the 1980's, my guess is that the MS Office code is pretty ugly and not easily comprehensible, let alone modifiable, by anyone who was not involved
in its development. It also takes a lot of time and effort to go through every line of code (millions in the case of MS Office) to assure the provenance of the code, both the Microsoft-written parts, as well as those that were licensed from others. Microsoft would have to include file headers with the authorship and licensing basis, too. Even if they made a priority of such a project, it could take two years or more, and much of the code would be gobble-de-gook. Then there is the matter of governance of the resulting project, as well as
the assignment of commit rights.
I just think of Microsoft Office as legacy software, and have no problem with their continuing to use their current licensing and distribution models. It won't be too long before that way of life disappears, and I would rather see Microsoft working more closely with the open source community on new projects that can be of benefit to all.
I'm not blaming, just reporting. President Bush, in a White House press release, defined what he calls the "ownership society", one in which individuals are responsible for providing for their own health care, retirement, and other needs. That's simply the Bush Administration's stated philosophy of the role of government in America. Whether we agree or disagree with that philosophy is a separate matter, but wasn't my central point here.
I'm old enough to remember that a job with IBM used to be pretty much a two-way lifetime commitment. When I worked there one summer as a student, no one could understand why I didn't want to work there permanently when I got out of school. When you joined IBM, you went where the company wanted you to go (I've Been Moved), lived in the "right" neighborhood, and conformed in your personal appearance. Now, of course, those notions are, at best, quaint.
Today, there are no lifetime commitments -- just a world in which companies feel greater responsibility to their shareholders and to Wall Street analysts than to their employees and their families. This is true "laissez faire" capitalism, and a harsh reality for the thousands of people that IBM will "restructure" out of their jobs.
After you run through your termination|retirement|severance "package", you're out of work and burning through your savings. If you're over 50, it's going to be a long, hard, and frustrating job search. For 18 months, you can pay $1000/month for your family's health care coverage (under COBRA), but you have to start early to find some insurer willing to offer you decent and affordable coverage afterward. Tens of thousands of former middle-class IBMers will unfortunately find themselves joining the more than 46 million uninsured Americans and/or taking low-level jobs without benefits. This is Bush's America, a land with no "safety net". It will be interesting to see how quickly the newly unemployed change their political allegiance to those candidates who address their needs and their newfound lower status.
Not knowing much about your specific situation, all I can say is that it's worth taking a look at Zimbra. It's beginning to get some enterprise adoption, and they have several million mailboxes for an unknown number of customers.
People aren't going to change from something they know without a very strong reason for doing so. That's why it's very difficult for new vendors to displace Microsoft, SAP, and Oracle. Enterprises have already made huge investments in licenses for those products, in support agreements, and in training for their employees. So there has to be a highly compelling reason -- performance, quality, cost, etc. -- for someone to switch. Historically, the cost difference has to be an order of magnitude.
The transition from Windows 2000 and Windows XP to Windows Vista provides a window of opportunity for Apple and others to gain market share, but these vendors have to make an effective business case to the IT managers who make the buying decisions and to the executives and industry analysts who influence those decisions. It's becoming easier to make that case, particularly when companies consider the need to replace their desktop machines to meet the performance requirements for Vista, and look at the need for updated peripherals, drivers, and applications to run on Vista. Then there's the terrible antivirus/firewall software for Windows, typically the inadequate Windows Vista components or the bloated, machine-crippling Symantec Internet Security. Those alone should get people looking at the Apple/MacOS alternative.
But Apple has to act on this opportunity, not just with the consumer-oriented TV ads, but also with enterprise-targeted ads in industry trade publication and analyst briefings that make the case more effectively than has previously been done. We will have to see if Apple does this, or continues to focus on the creative community, the home user, and their iPod/iTunes juggernaut.
I'm a long-term Mac user and even have a working original 128K Mac in my basement. This entry has been created on my shiny new MacBook Pro. I'd love to see Apple have more success in the enterprise but Steve is going to have to lead the charge.
I would be willing to take a few craplets if we could get rid of the bloatware that comes on PCs supplied by the largest vendors. All of those free trials and resource-hogging applets (think McAfee and Symantec) can make a new machine almost as slow as the old one it is replacing. I understand that the hardware vendors are paid by the various software vendors to preinstall their software and that this revenue is a key profit source for the hardware vendor. I called Dell last year and asked them if I could pay extra to get a "clean" machine with just the OS and their device drivers installed. That wasn't an option, which means that I spent the first few hours with their machine "cleaning" it.
By contrast, I got a new MacBook Pro this week. I started it up, was prompted to transfer files from my older Mac, connected the two machines with a FireWire cable, and an hour later I was up and running with all of my files, music, video, and programs. And best of all, no third-party junk. All in all, an outstanding experience and a huge contrast with the Dell Windoze experience.
Yes, indeed, you need a passport. Starting in January, a passport will be required even from citizens of Canada, Mexico, and other countries where it was previously not required. As for knowing your plans, many visitors to the US not only need a passport, but also have to apply in person at a US Consultate or Embassy to obtain a visa. The visa application requires you to tell the US government when you are traveling, how you are planning to get here, when you are going to leave, and how you are going to support yourself during your stay. (Once you get here, though, you won't be under constant surveillance and your money will go much further than in many other places, even in expensive NYC and San Francisco.)
As an American, I feel badly about the hassle, and wish that our government would reduce the barriers for international visitors. It may come as a small consolation that the US government has become aware of the need to improve the situation. Perhaps things will improve with the new Congress. Potential visitors should keep in mind that most residents of coastal cities have consistently voted heavily against the Bush Administration and their supporters. In the 2004 election, Bush received only 15% of the vote in Manhattan and San Francisco and less than 10% in Washington, DC. He wouldn't do that well today, so visitors will have no trouble in finding a sympathetic ear as they describe what they had to do to get here. We'll do our best to make you feel welcome.
I'm also a fan of the Mac and iChat, but many people have to support Windows as well as the Mac.
I've been very pleased with SightSpeed, which will support a small conference (up to 4 people) cross-platform (Mac/Windows) at 30 fps. One-to-one video chat is free to registered users, but organizing a conference requires SightSpeed Pro, which is US $5/month or US $50/year.
I've also been watching DimDim, an open source video conferencing startup. Their solution is still at the Alpha stage, so it is too early to see if it will be competitive. They are promising that it will be free, so it's worth keeping an eye on their site.
A key goal of the $100 laptop project (One Laptop Per Child) is to provide children with their own networked computers so that they can use them as a learning tool. Nick Negroponte has continually said that the project is about education, not about laptops. Other educational computing projects in developing countries often have many children working with a single computer; the result is that one student learns and the others just watch.
Applications for the program had to be submitted by senior government officials, e.g., Minister of Education, with the expectation that up to 1 million laptops would be deployed in each country that was accepted. As others have noted, the countries selected for the initial round are not the world's poorest countries, but rather developing countries that are able to support the project in a meaningful way. These countries include Brazil, Argentina, Thailand, Libya, and Nigeria. There's a lot of information about the project, including a Wiki, at http://www.laptop.org/
There's some interesting technology in these machines, including the wind-up battery and the mesh network capability. It's also notable that the operating system is a variant of RedHat Linux. Millions of children will see a Linux desktop in their first exposure to a computer. That also means Firefox rather than IE as a browser.
I'm very anxious to see how this project works in its first deployments. I can think of some areas of the US that would also benefit from this project. If OLPC is a big success elsewhere, it could push the US Department of Education to put the US in the same category as these developing countries so that American kids in impoverished areas can also benefit from this project.
Re: What's so bad about .... Sarbanes-Oxley?
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Enron's Kenneth Lay Dies
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It's the cost of compliance that is so bad. If you are a huge company, say Exxon, with its $10 Billion quarterly profit, then you can afford to pay for the accountants, lawyers, IT auditors, and others needed to assure compliance. I would guess that Exxon pays $10M/quarter for this, about $0.1% of their profits. But if you are a software company with $25M in annual revenue and maybe $2M in annual profit before taxes, with hopes of going public, then the cost of SarbOx compliance makes it nearly impossible to do so. It's hard to spend less than $500K annually and satisfy the SarbOx requirements. For a small company, this amounts to at least 25% of earnings, which reduces the likely value of their stock, since investors tend to focus on price/earnings ratios. I was told that SarbOx was an important reason why JBoss decided to be acquired rather than try to go public on their own.
Tried to buy a Linux notebook from HP or Dell?
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It will be interesting to see if Lenovo will shun Linux worldwide or if they will offer Linux running on their machines in other countries. One opportunity they might follow is to offer Red Flag Linux in China. The US market for Linux is growing, but it is so small compared to that of the dominant desktop OS vendor that Lenovo has made the business decision to focus just on Windows. Lenovo's bigger problem is that they may not succeed in the US market because of their Chinese ownership; if they partner exclusively with Microsoft, they might pick up a partner who can help them with the US government.
In general, it's hard to buy machines with Linux preinstalled, particularly notebooks, directly from hardware vendors in the US. Check out the HP, Dell, and Gateway websites to see what they offer. (I can save you some time and report that it is essentially zero on their US sites.)
As others have noted, Dell, HP, and others have established OEM relationships with resellers such as EmperorLinux, who configure, sell, and support Linux boxes. In that way, HP and Dell can make the money from the hardware sale without incurring the problem of supporting a Linux distro. The reseller can then decide which distros to install and support for each machine. As the end user for a Linux system, that actually works better for me. Even if I could buy it directly from Dell or HP, I already have a fairly good idea of the level of support that they would provide to me as an end user.
So I wouldn't worry very much about Lenovo's shunning of Linux. If they make good machines, someone will come along to configure and support them for Linux.
I sent a message to Rep. Wolf. Here's how to do it. You go to his email contact page where he asks for your Zip code. Use the address of his office: 22601-4730 and give the street address: 110 North Cameron Street, Winchester, VA -- that's one of his district offices. You can fill in any name or email address that you like -- I used the name "Smarter T. Yu".
I told him that the way to alleviate his security concerns is not just to ban Lenovo notebooks, but all notebooks and mobile phones with Chinese components. I observed that this would take the US military back to the telecommunications level used in World War II, which was the last war that the US actually won, so that this might actually be a brilliant idea.
Finally, I noted that I would prefer that our US tax dollars go to companies whose profits actually stay in the US, so Apple and Dell were better choices than Lenovo. Of course, they'd have to stop buying Jeeps, which are made by Daimler.
Two weeks ago, I posted a message after Kevin Carmody introduced Freespire at the Linux Desktop Summit. For those who didn't see it, the message seems relevant to this discussion, so I thought that I would ask forgiveness for repeating myself and post it again. Here's what I wrote:
"Linspire is, of course, a purely commercial effort, with the goal of selling a shrink-wrapped OS that looks externally as much like Windows as possible. His target audience is not the Slashdot crowd, but rather the people who buy their computers at Wal-Mart. Really! For them, it's all about the out-of-the-box experience, starting up a computer with preinstalled OS and apps and just using it. As someone who has recently installed Mandriva, Fedora 5, and Ubuntu Breezy on various machines, I think that the experience is much better than it once was, but still falls short of the "Wal-Mart" or even the Windows experience.
To listen to Kevin Carmody, Freespire is offered in the spirit of recognizing the contributions of the open source community, and giving people the opportunity to stay "pure", i.e., without licensed and proprietary pieces, or hybrid, where the user can choose to download and perhaps pay for the licensed and proprietary pieces. He gave an analogy with food, where the choices were Junk Food (Windows and proprietary software), Healthy Food, and Vegan. Open source vegans, of course, are those who would never want music in the proprietary MP3 format or images in the proprietary JPG format.
His belief is that most consumers and business people would like Healthy Food, which is some mix of Linux and those proprietary formats, plus some drivers for graphics cards, etc.. He and his company are actually going out to Fortune 500 companies and talking to them about why they should consider a move to something like Freespire rather than suffering the pain and expense of migrating to Windows Vista (if and when it ever ships). This is a fairly brave, not to say crazy, thing to do, and I think that they deserve some credit and support for their evangelism, even from people who don't care for the whole Linspire business. Getting 3-4% penetration of Linux (any flavor) on corporate desktops would be quite an achievement, and it won't come from Linspire on its own.
Carmody also said that they are going to open source Click N Run because they think that it is the best updating program, and are offering it to others for the taking. If I were responsible for Ubuntu or other Debian-based distros, I would be very tempted to take them up on their offer. I've done enough "apt-get"s."
I am attending the Desktop Linux Summit where Kevin Carmody (Linspire CEO) made the Freespire announcement. (Side note: he's a very good speaker.)
I thought that his positioning of Freespire and his reasoning behind it are worth sharing with Slashdotters. Linspire is, of course, a purely commercial effort, with the goal of selling a shrink-wrapped OS that looks externally as much like Windows as possible. His target audience is not the Slashdot crowd, but rather the people who buy their computers at Wal-Mart. Really! For them, it's all about the out-of-the-box experience, starting up a computer with preinstalled OS and apps and just using it. As someone who has recently installed Mandriva, Fedora 5, and Ubuntu Breezy on various machines, I think that the experience is much better than it once was, but still falls short of the "Wal-Mart" or even the Windows experience.
To listen to Kevin Carmody, Freespire is offered in the spirit of recognizing the contributions of the open source community, and giving people the opportunity to stay "pure", i.e., without licensed and proprietary pieces, or hybrid, where the user can choose to download and perhaps pay for the licensed and proprietary pieces. He gave an analogy with food, where the choices were Junk Food (Windows and proprietary software), Healthy Food, and Vegan. Open source vegans, of course, are those who would never want music in the proprietary MP3 format or images in the proprietary JPG format.
His belief is that most consumers and business people would like Healthy Food, which is some mix of Linux and those proprietary formats, plus some drivers for graphics cards, etc.. He and his company are actually going out to Fortune 500 companies and talking to them about why they should consider a move to something like Freespire rather than suffering the pain and expense of migrating to Windows Vista (if and when it ever ships). This is a fairly brave, not to say crazy, thing to do, and I think that they deserve some credit and support for their evangelism, even from people who don't care for the whole Linspire business.
Getting 3-4% penetration of Linux (any flavor) on corporate desktops would be quite an achievement, and it won't come from Linspire on its own.
Carmody also said that they are going to open source Click N Run because they think that it is the best updating program, and are offering it to others for the taking. If I were responsible for Ubuntu or other Debian-based distros, I would be very tempted to take them up on their offer. I've done enough "apt-get"s.
There are smart people and talented developers all over the world. The results of the recent ACM Programming Contest http://icpc.baylor.edu/icpc/Finals/ show that very clearly. Salaries and overhead costs for developers (and everyone else) in Eastern Europe, Latin America, Asia, and India, are far less than salaries in North America, so American developers are at a significant competitive disadvantage from purely a financial perspective. US companies will continue to send software development work offshore. Thomas Friedman explains all of this very well in The World Is Flat, which I highly recommend.
That said, there are lots of great opportunities for developers in North America, as long as you think about how to differentiate yourself from an average cubicle-based, head-down code jockey. One way is to develop an outstanding professional reputation as a developer, perhaps through a visible role on a popular open source project. That recognition can sustain a successful consulting business.
Another way is to use your technical skills in a customer-facing role, perhaps as a system engineer at a software or system vendor, providing onsite support and custom development for a customer. That role requires good communication skills and an upgraded wardrobe, but can't easily be replicated by someone halfway around the world. The downside of this role is that you don't get to contribute to a product and you may find yourself in a product niche. But companies always need technical people who can talk to customers and prospective customers.
A third way is to envision a career path leading to become a senior engineering manager or a CTO. You can start as a developer with the full expectation that your code-writing days may be limited. Accordingly, you begin to network with managers to learn more about their work (and let them know of your interest in a management role), and take some management and/or business-related courses. Make an effort to understand how your current and envisioned future positions fit into your company's business strategy, since that can help you pick the projects on which to work. Speak up in meetings, volunteer to be the techie in your company's trade show booth, and generally make yourself visible as someone looking for more responsibility. Be prepared to leave your current position if that responsibility isn't forthcoming.
The US has become one of the most expensive countries for employers, not just because of relative salaries, but also because of health insurance costs, litigation, and regulatory costs. As a result, if a job can be done effectively elsewhere, it is either already there or likely to migrate there soon. This is true not just for software development, but also for lots of other "white collar" jobs. Of course, most of the manufacturing jobs are already long gone. But that's a whole other discussion.
The issue is not where the laptops are made, since they are all made in Asia, but rather where the money ends up. When you buy a Lenovo ThinkPad, some of the money goes to pay their employees, some of whom are in the US. However, all of the profits end up with Lenovo, which is owned by the Chinese government. As far as I am concerned, the less money that I send to the People's Republic of China, the better. Apart from their lack of respect for intellectual property, their limitations on personal freedoms, their high rate of capital punishment, and their crackdowns on Tibet and Falun Gong, the Chinese government uses some of those profits to fund a military buildup. It won't be too many years before we see the first Chinese aircraft carrier, which they may call Lenovo. By contrast, when you buy a machine with an Apple, HP, or Dell label, lots of your money goes overseas, but the profits end up in the US, where the company pays both federal and local taxes. Does the Lenovo ThinkPad have some unique feature available nowhere else? If so, then there is a good reason to buy one; if not, it's just a commodity.
We could have much the same discussion about automobiles. There are lots of good reasons and feature differences to justify buying a car from someone other than the two remaining American manufacturers. (Chrysler is owned by a German company.) As with computers, many of the parts (as well as the steel) that goes into the "American" cars are made outside the US by foreign companies. Also, when you buy a "foreign" car, the brand may be owned by an American company (Saab, Volvo). The notion of "Buy American" again reflects the notion that GM and Ford pay taxes in the US when they are profitable.
I was invited to see a live prelaunch demo of Krugle, which is named for Ken Krugler (co-founder and CTO). This site goes way beyond what is available in koders.com, since it pulls up tutorials, documentation, developer sites, and other relevant developer-related information. Thus, a search for PHP will give you php.net, but also lots of PHP-related sites, such as O'Reilly's OnLAMP, etc.
They are planning to go live on March 8th, so you can check it out then. I was impressed.
Put the pressure on the other parts of Sony's business, too. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that Sony preinstalls this DRM software on their VAIO machines. I'm buying new equipment for my research lab and decided not to buy Sony because of this DRM issue. The price of a VAIO notebook is about the same as the price of 100 CDs. A drop in computer sales will make Sir Howard pay greater attention.
Slashdot Mirror
The Fox Business Channel will give Her Worship the right-wing national audience that she wants in the hope that she can parlay it into a leadership position in the Republican Party and possible future elective office. That would give her the chance to mess up the country the way she messed up HP.
The BestBuy closest to my home displays several different iMacs, but they don't really sell them in the sense that a sales person gives you a demonstration of the features, lets you play with it, and tells you why its a good choice. In addition, they only have their Mac-knowledgeable staff working on the weekends, and only about one out of every three of their stores carries Macs. So they are going to have to do a lot better than that if Apple is to increase their Mac sales over the holidays.
When a company or its products get a deservedly bad reputation, consultants often recommend that the company rename itself or its products in the hope that consumers won't remember the connection. Thus, ValuJet became AirTran and Retail Credit became Equifax. Enron is now Enron Creditors Recovery Corporation, but it's a pretty safe bet that any future operational parts of Enron will get a new, non-Enron game. So Diebold is just playing the same game in the hope that people are not paying careful attention.
Lots of great suggestions already. You might also want to read a good book on best practices for open source development projects. Karl Fogel's "Producing Open Source Software" is excellent and available in print form or free online here.
The OSI is focusing on companies that call their products and services "Open Source" when that is not really the case. Here are four examples where that can happen: 1) a company will release the source code for a product (under its own "non-approved" license), but will keep a more complete version of the product closed, releasing the product only in binary form under a traditional commercial license; 2) a company will start with open source software available under a BSD license, then close the product (permitted under the license) and release their product only in binary form under a traditional commercial license; 3) a company will start with open source software and use it to build a "Software as a Service" application available only as a web-based application, with no source code distribution at all. Most of the companies offering SaaS web applications avoid the use of "Open Source" to describe their services, so this example applies only to a small number of offenders.
I don't think that the OSI has any intention of going after people who put their non-commercial projects up on Source Forge (or some other forge). For those who do so, it's a good idea to associate an OSI-approved license with your work so that others who might want to use your software can be comfortable and secure about the terms and conditions under which it can be used.
I just think of Microsoft Office as legacy software, and have no problem with their continuing to use their current licensing and distribution models. It won't be too long before that way of life disappears, and I would rather see Microsoft working more closely with the open source community on new projects that can be of benefit to all.
I'm not blaming, just reporting. President Bush, in a White House press release, defined what he calls the "ownership society", one in which individuals are responsible for providing for their own health care, retirement, and other needs. That's simply the Bush Administration's stated philosophy of the role of government in America. Whether we agree or disagree with that philosophy is a separate matter, but wasn't my central point here.
Today, there are no lifetime commitments -- just a world in which companies feel greater responsibility to their shareholders and to Wall Street analysts than to their employees and their families. This is true "laissez faire" capitalism, and a harsh reality for the thousands of people that IBM will "restructure" out of their jobs.
After you run through your termination|retirement|severance "package", you're out of work and burning through your savings. If you're over 50, it's going to be a long, hard, and frustrating job search. For 18 months, you can pay $1000/month for your family's health care coverage (under COBRA), but you have to start early to find some insurer willing to offer you decent and affordable coverage afterward. Tens of thousands of former middle-class IBMers will unfortunately find themselves joining the more than 46 million uninsured Americans and/or taking low-level jobs without benefits. This is Bush's America, a land with no "safety net". It will be interesting to see how quickly the newly unemployed change their political allegiance to those candidates who address their needs and their newfound lower status.
Not knowing much about your specific situation, all I can say is that it's worth taking a look at Zimbra. It's beginning to get some enterprise adoption, and they have several million mailboxes for an unknown number of customers.
The transition from Windows 2000 and Windows XP to Windows Vista provides a window of opportunity for Apple and others to gain market share, but these vendors have to make an effective business case to the IT managers who make the buying decisions and to the executives and industry analysts who influence those decisions. It's becoming easier to make that case, particularly when companies consider the need to replace their desktop machines to meet the performance requirements for Vista, and look at the need for updated peripherals, drivers, and applications to run on Vista. Then there's the terrible antivirus/firewall software for Windows, typically the inadequate Windows Vista components or the bloated, machine-crippling Symantec Internet Security. Those alone should get people looking at the Apple/MacOS alternative.
But Apple has to act on this opportunity, not just with the consumer-oriented TV ads, but also with enterprise-targeted ads in industry trade publication and analyst briefings that make the case more effectively than has previously been done. We will have to see if Apple does this, or continues to focus on the creative community, the home user, and their iPod/iTunes juggernaut.
I'm a long-term Mac user and even have a working original 128K Mac in my basement. This entry has been created on my shiny new MacBook Pro. I'd love to see Apple have more success in the enterprise but Steve is going to have to lead the charge.
By contrast, I got a new MacBook Pro this week. I started it up, was prompted to transfer files from my older Mac, connected the two machines with a FireWire cable, and an hour later I was up and running with all of my files, music, video, and programs. And best of all, no third-party junk. All in all, an outstanding experience and a huge contrast with the Dell Windoze experience.
Yes, indeed, you need a passport. Starting in January, a passport will be required even from citizens of Canada, Mexico, and other countries where it was previously not required. As for knowing your plans, many visitors to the US not only need a passport, but also have to apply in person at a US Consultate or Embassy to obtain a visa. The visa application requires you to tell the US government when you are traveling, how you are planning to get here, when you are going to leave, and how you are going to support yourself during your stay. (Once you get here, though, you won't be under constant surveillance and your money will go much further than in many other places, even in expensive NYC and San Francisco.) As an American, I feel badly about the hassle, and wish that our government would reduce the barriers for international visitors. It may come as a small consolation that the US government has become aware of the need to improve the situation. Perhaps things will improve with the new Congress. Potential visitors should keep in mind that most residents of coastal cities have consistently voted heavily against the Bush Administration and their supporters. In the 2004 election, Bush received only 15% of the vote in Manhattan and San Francisco and less than 10% in Washington, DC. He wouldn't do that well today, so visitors will have no trouble in finding a sympathetic ear as they describe what they had to do to get here. We'll do our best to make you feel welcome.
I've been very pleased with SightSpeed, which will support a small conference (up to 4 people) cross-platform (Mac/Windows) at 30 fps. One-to-one video chat is free to registered users, but organizing a conference requires SightSpeed Pro, which is US $5/month or US $50/year.
I've also been watching DimDim, an open source video conferencing startup. Their solution is still at the Alpha stage, so it is too early to see if it will be competitive. They are promising that it will be free, so it's worth keeping an eye on their site.
Applications for the program had to be submitted by senior government officials, e.g., Minister of Education, with the expectation that up to 1 million laptops would be deployed in each country that was accepted. As others have noted, the countries selected for the initial round are not the world's poorest countries, but rather developing countries that are able to support the project in a meaningful way. These countries include Brazil, Argentina, Thailand, Libya, and Nigeria. There's a lot of information about the project, including a Wiki, at http://www.laptop.org/
There's some interesting technology in these machines, including the wind-up battery and the mesh network capability. It's also notable that the operating system is a variant of RedHat Linux. Millions of children will see a Linux desktop in their first exposure to a computer. That also means Firefox rather than IE as a browser.
I'm very anxious to see how this project works in its first deployments. I can think of some areas of the US that would also benefit from this project. If OLPC is a big success elsewhere, it could push the US Department of Education to put the US in the same category as these developing countries so that American kids in impoverished areas can also benefit from this project.
It's the cost of compliance that is so bad. If you are a huge company, say Exxon, with its $10 Billion quarterly profit, then you can afford to pay for the accountants, lawyers, IT auditors, and others needed to assure compliance. I would guess that Exxon pays $10M/quarter for this, about $0.1% of their profits. But if you are a software company with $25M in annual revenue and maybe $2M in annual profit before taxes, with hopes of going public, then the cost of SarbOx compliance makes it nearly impossible to do so. It's hard to spend less than $500K annually and satisfy the SarbOx requirements. For a small company, this amounts to at least 25% of earnings, which reduces the likely value of their stock, since investors tend to focus on price/earnings ratios. I was told that SarbOx was an important reason why JBoss decided to be acquired rather than try to go public on their own.
In general, it's hard to buy machines with Linux preinstalled, particularly notebooks, directly from hardware vendors in the US. Check out the HP, Dell, and Gateway websites to see what they offer. (I can save you some time and report that it is essentially zero on their US sites.)
As others have noted, Dell, HP, and others have established OEM relationships with resellers such as EmperorLinux, who configure, sell, and support Linux boxes. In that way, HP and Dell can make the money from the hardware sale without incurring the problem of supporting a Linux distro. The reseller can then decide which distros to install and support for each machine. As the end user for a Linux system, that actually works better for me. Even if I could buy it directly from Dell or HP, I already have a fairly good idea of the level of support that they would provide to me as an end user.
So I wouldn't worry very much about Lenovo's shunning of Linux. If they make good machines, someone will come along to configure and support them for Linux.
Will repost in Lenovo discussion. Sorry about that.
I told him that the way to alleviate his security concerns is not just to ban Lenovo notebooks, but all notebooks and mobile phones with Chinese components. I observed that this would take the US military back to the telecommunications level used in World War II, which was the last war that the US actually won, so that this might actually be a brilliant idea.
Finally, I noted that I would prefer that our US tax dollars go to companies whose profits actually stay in the US, so Apple and Dell were better choices than Lenovo. Of course, they'd have to stop buying Jeeps, which are made by Daimler.
"I did not have sexual relations with that data." - GW Bush
Two weeks ago, I posted a message after Kevin Carmody introduced Freespire at the Linux Desktop Summit. For those who didn't see it, the message seems relevant to this discussion, so I thought that I would ask forgiveness for repeating myself and post it again. Here's what I wrote: "Linspire is, of course, a purely commercial effort, with the goal of selling a shrink-wrapped OS that looks externally as much like Windows as possible. His target audience is not the Slashdot crowd, but rather the people who buy their computers at Wal-Mart. Really! For them, it's all about the out-of-the-box experience, starting up a computer with preinstalled OS and apps and just using it. As someone who has recently installed Mandriva, Fedora 5, and Ubuntu Breezy on various machines, I think that the experience is much better than it once was, but still falls short of the "Wal-Mart" or even the Windows experience. To listen to Kevin Carmody, Freespire is offered in the spirit of recognizing the contributions of the open source community, and giving people the opportunity to stay "pure", i.e., without licensed and proprietary pieces, or hybrid, where the user can choose to download and perhaps pay for the licensed and proprietary pieces. He gave an analogy with food, where the choices were Junk Food (Windows and proprietary software), Healthy Food, and Vegan. Open source vegans, of course, are those who would never want music in the proprietary MP3 format or images in the proprietary JPG format. His belief is that most consumers and business people would like Healthy Food, which is some mix of Linux and those proprietary formats, plus some drivers for graphics cards, etc.. He and his company are actually going out to Fortune 500 companies and talking to them about why they should consider a move to something like Freespire rather than suffering the pain and expense of migrating to Windows Vista (if and when it ever ships). This is a fairly brave, not to say crazy, thing to do, and I think that they deserve some credit and support for their evangelism, even from people who don't care for the whole Linspire business. Getting 3-4% penetration of Linux (any flavor) on corporate desktops would be quite an achievement, and it won't come from Linspire on its own. Carmody also said that they are going to open source Click N Run because they think that it is the best updating program, and are offering it to others for the taking. If I were responsible for Ubuntu or other Debian-based distros, I would be very tempted to take them up on their offer. I've done enough "apt-get"s."
I thought that his positioning of Freespire and his reasoning behind it are worth sharing with Slashdotters. Linspire is, of course, a purely commercial effort, with the goal of selling a shrink-wrapped OS that looks externally as much like Windows as possible. His target audience is not the Slashdot crowd, but rather the people who buy their computers at Wal-Mart. Really! For them, it's all about the out-of-the-box experience, starting up a computer with preinstalled OS and apps and just using it. As someone who has recently installed Mandriva, Fedora 5, and Ubuntu Breezy on various machines, I think that the experience is much better than it once was, but still falls short of the "Wal-Mart" or even the Windows experience.
To listen to Kevin Carmody, Freespire is offered in the spirit of recognizing the contributions of the open source community, and giving people the opportunity to stay "pure", i.e., without licensed and proprietary pieces, or hybrid, where the user can choose to download and perhaps pay for the licensed and proprietary pieces. He gave an analogy with food, where the choices were Junk Food (Windows and proprietary software), Healthy Food, and Vegan. Open source vegans, of course, are those who would never want music in the proprietary MP3 format or images in the proprietary JPG format.
His belief is that most consumers and business people would like Healthy Food, which is some mix of Linux and those proprietary formats, plus some drivers for graphics cards, etc.. He and his company are actually going out to Fortune 500 companies and talking to them about why they should consider a move to something like Freespire rather than suffering the pain and expense of migrating to Windows Vista (if and when it ever ships). This is a fairly brave, not to say crazy, thing to do, and I think that they deserve some credit and support for their evangelism, even from people who don't care for the whole Linspire business. Getting 3-4% penetration of Linux (any flavor) on corporate desktops would be quite an achievement, and it won't come from Linspire on its own.
Carmody also said that they are going to open source Click N Run because they think that it is the best updating program, and are offering it to others for the taking. If I were responsible for Ubuntu or other Debian-based distros, I would be very tempted to take them up on their offer. I've done enough "apt-get"s.
That said, there are lots of great opportunities for developers in North America, as long as you think about how to differentiate yourself from an average cubicle-based, head-down code jockey. One way is to develop an outstanding professional reputation as a developer, perhaps through a visible role on a popular open source project. That recognition can sustain a successful consulting business.
Another way is to use your technical skills in a customer-facing role, perhaps as a system engineer at a software or system vendor, providing onsite support and custom development for a customer. That role requires good communication skills and an upgraded wardrobe, but can't easily be replicated by someone halfway around the world. The downside of this role is that you don't get to contribute to a product and you may find yourself in a product niche. But companies always need technical people who can talk to customers and prospective customers.
A third way is to envision a career path leading to become a senior engineering manager or a CTO. You can start as a developer with the full expectation that your code-writing days may be limited. Accordingly, you begin to network with managers to learn more about their work (and let them know of your interest in a management role), and take some management and/or business-related courses. Make an effort to understand how your current and envisioned future positions fit into your company's business strategy, since that can help you pick the projects on which to work. Speak up in meetings, volunteer to be the techie in your company's trade show booth, and generally make yourself visible as someone looking for more responsibility. Be prepared to leave your current position if that responsibility isn't forthcoming.
The US has become one of the most expensive countries for employers, not just because of relative salaries, but also because of health insurance costs, litigation, and regulatory costs. As a result, if a job can be done effectively elsewhere, it is either already there or likely to migrate there soon. This is true not just for software development, but also for lots of other "white collar" jobs. Of course, most of the manufacturing jobs are already long gone. But that's a whole other discussion.
The issue is not where the laptops are made, since they are all made in Asia, but rather where the money ends up. When you buy a Lenovo ThinkPad, some of the money goes to pay their employees, some of whom are in the US. However, all of the profits end up with Lenovo, which is owned by the Chinese government. As far as I am concerned, the less money that I send to the People's Republic of China, the better. Apart from their lack of respect for intellectual property, their limitations on personal freedoms, their high rate of capital punishment, and their crackdowns on Tibet and Falun Gong, the Chinese government uses some of those profits to fund a military buildup. It won't be too many years before we see the first Chinese aircraft carrier, which they may call Lenovo. By contrast, when you buy a machine with an Apple, HP, or Dell label, lots of your money goes overseas, but the profits end up in the US, where the company pays both federal and local taxes. Does the Lenovo ThinkPad have some unique feature available nowhere else? If so, then there is a good reason to buy one; if not, it's just a commodity.
We could have much the same discussion about automobiles. There are lots of good reasons and feature differences to justify buying a car from someone other than the two remaining American manufacturers. (Chrysler is owned by a German company.) As with computers, many of the parts (as well as the steel) that goes into the "American" cars are made outside the US by foreign companies. Also, when you buy a "foreign" car, the brand may be owned by an American company (Saab, Volvo). The notion of "Buy American" again reflects the notion that GM and Ford pay taxes in the US when they are profitable.
I was invited to see a live prelaunch demo of Krugle, which is named for Ken Krugler (co-founder and CTO). This site goes way beyond what is available in koders.com, since it pulls up tutorials, documentation, developer sites, and other relevant developer-related information. Thus, a search for PHP will give you php.net, but also lots of PHP-related sites, such as O'Reilly's OnLAMP, etc. They are planning to go live on March 8th, so you can check it out then. I was impressed.
Put the pressure on the other parts of Sony's business, too. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that Sony preinstalls this DRM software on their VAIO machines. I'm buying new equipment for my research lab and decided not to buy Sony because of this DRM issue. The price of a VAIO notebook is about the same as the price of 100 CDs. A drop in computer sales will make Sir Howard pay greater attention.